The Ghost Of Spectres Past
Symantec, Tuesday, June 17th, 2025
To defend against a CPU vulnerability that just won't die, it all boils down to fundamentals
The recent disclosure of a new Spectre exploit has pushed into the spotlight once more a risk that is impossible to eliminate and can truly only be mitigated. And when it comes to mitigation, the magic wand boils down to fundamentals.
Spectre is a vulnerability in modern CPU architecture that exploits a flaw in the Speculative Execution part of the CPU. (Think data caches in the CPU that pre-fetch what is likely needed next in the execution chain in an attempt to predictively execute code).