Question

What are Meltdown & Spectre? What are their security implication?

What are the impacts of Meltdown & Spectre on the wireless networks?

Answer 1

What are Meltdown & Spectre? What are their security implication?

Spectra and Meltdown are the names given to the vulnerability that affects the computer chips which are manufactured in the last 20 years. It allows attackers to get access to data which were supposed to be completely protected.

Meltdown is a hardware vulnerability affecting Intel 86 Microprocessors, IBM POWER Processors and some ARM based microprocessors.It allows rogue process to have unauthorized access to data.

Spectre is a vulnerability that affects modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction.

While programs are not allowed to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit meltdown and spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs.This might include the passwords stored in password manager or browser, personal photos, emails and business-critical documents.

Meltdown and Spectre gain access to protected data by exploiting two important techniques used to speed up computer chips, called Speculative Execution and Caching.

What are the impacts of Meltdown & Spectre on the wireless networks?

Meltdown and spectre impact networking products like Application Delivery Controllers and WAN Optimization Controllers.

Java Script Code on a website to use Spectre to trick a web browser into revealing user and password information.

Attackers could exploit meltdown to view data owned by other users and other virtual servers hosted on the same hardware, which is disastrous for cloud computing hosts.