An accessible overview of Meltdown and Spectre, Part 2

Figure 1: How branch misprediction leads to speculative execution. When the branch predictor makes an incorrect guess about the destination of a conditional branch, some instructions are speculatively executed. The execution of these instructions is undone, but their effects on the cache remain. Spectre causes the branch predictor to guess wrong and speculatively execute a carefully chosen set of instructions.

This is the second half of our blog post on the Meltdown an Spectre vulnerabilities, describing Spectre Variant 1 (V1) and Spectre Variant 2 (V2). If you have not done so already, please review the first blog post for an accessible review of computer architecture fundamentals. This blog post will start by covering the technical … Continue reading An accessible overview of Meltdown and Spectre, Part 2