This kind of challenge is an important exercise worth practicing for us who want to protect “normal people” from security threats. Note, that the reason for this challenge is that Spectre/Meltdown is one of the most complex hard-to-wrap-your-brain-around security exploits of recent years, and we in cyber security are notoriously bad at explaining things to anyone outside our little bubble. Reading this kind of thing, and stopping to look up concepts that are new to you, is a great way to turn yourself into an expert, if that’s what you want. No need to panic though, it is very difficult and expensive to make someone’s computer cook lead cakes.Īnd, all the time, clever people are putting in additional protections to make it harder for the baddies to make your phone cook lead cakes.įor those interested in diving deeper, here is the website for these bugs, along with detailed technical papers. This problem is present in approximately 100% of computers and mobile devices worldwide. That’s approximately how Spectre/Meltdown works. It doesn’t matter that you throw the lead cake in the bin when I don’t come. If you ask the computer in the right way, a computer will.

If I tell you I only eat lead-based food, and I might come to your party, you won’t go and start touching and breathing lots of lead to make me a lead cake, just in case I come. This is because, unlike humans, computers are pretty stupid in some ways. They can make your computer start preparing for something that will never happen in a way that results in things you don’t want. If it doesn’t happen, you just throw away the extra.īad people can write clever apps to use this trick against you. It’s like cooking extra food in case more people than expected join your party. One trick is guessing what will happen next, and already do things just in case the things you guessed really happen. Go try to explain Spectre and Meltdown to normal people, I dare ya’Ĭomputer and phones use lots of clever tricks to run your apps faster. Patricia Aas of TurtleSec Norway issued a challenge to the cyber security community:

For android instal Spectre