Spectre is the CPU vulnerability that just keeps on giving. Now Spectre 1.1 and 1.2 have emerged from the shadows…
Actually, these aren’t the first variations on the Spectre theme to emerge; there have been at least four Spectre variants to appear so far. They are, however, new variants of the original vulnerability and have been dubbed Spectre 1.1 and 1.2 as a result. Like most sequels, they aren’t quite as gripping as the original but nonetheless cannot be ignored.
In a nutshell, Spectre 1.1 can leverage speculative stores to create speculative buffer overflows while Spectre 1.2 enables the targeting of CPUs without the proper read/write protection in order to breach sandboxes. So, do these latest vulnerability disclosures point to an inescapable fact that processor design flaws will continue to be a pain point for security teams for the foreseeable future?
