An Evaluation of Meltdown Vulnerability

These days processors are becoming faster and faster. This translates indirectly into a significant improvement in the quality of life. However, there is a price to be paid; this evolution is associated with the emergence of many threats, which seem to develop even faster and are often not realized by professionals. Striving to maximally increase the computational power resulted in vulnerabilities on the level of the very processors. These vulnerabilities are mostly associated with the mechanisms of speculative execution and cache use in modern processors. Some of them came to light after many years. An example here might be Spectre vulnerabilities class which has been found in most Intel's processors (and not only) from 2006 and which was disclosed as late as in 2017. In the recent years many of such security vulnerabilities arose and according to many experts this is just the beginning. This article presents our evaluation of Spectre version 3 (Meltdown) vulnerability. It is just a prelude to further research regarding low-level vulnerabilities we are going to pursue.