Problem Description:
A number of issues relating to speculative execution
were found last year and publicly announced January 3rd.
Two of these, known as Meltdown and Spectre V2, are addressed
here.
CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown) - ------------------------
This issue relies on an affected CPU speculatively
executing instructions beyond a faulting instruction. When
this happens, changes to architectural state are not
committed, but observable changes may be left in micro-
architectural state (for example, cache). This may be used
to infer privileged data.
CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre V2) - --------------------------
Spectre V2 uses branch target injection to speculatively
execute kernel code at an address under the control of an
attacker.
Impact:
An attacker may be able to read secret data from the
kernel or from a process when executing untrusted code (for
example, in a web browser).