Big Chip Flaws Affect Apple

Meltdown and Spectre bugs require software update

- Alan Stonebridge

The world has been ablaze with talk of the Meltdown and Spectre bugs, but what are they, and how do they affect you? The vulnerabilities first came to light on 3 January 2018, when they were made public in the media. Affected hardware and software vendors had been made aware of the issues in the summer of 2017, but had been unable to release security patches in time.

Meltdown and Spectre are security vulnerabilities in the architectural design of modern CPUs. If taken advantage of, they could allow an application to read any information stored in your device’s memory, whether its authorised to or not.

That is, of course, a very serious weakness. Meltdown, for instance, could allow a hacker to gain access to your passwords, emails, photos and more as these are temporarily stored in the processor’s cache.

Spectre, meanwhile, is slightly different. Modern CPUs use something called branch prediction, which allows the chip to guess and prepare for the next instruction it will have to process, which can help it to work more efficiently. However, there is a chance that this could reveal private information that could be accessed by a malicious third party.