2025-04-26 –, Seminar Room 7
This case study, explained by 2 master's students, dives into the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, which were exploited to target the CPU architecture design aimed at enhancing performance.
Retrospectively, the system had failsafes in place to address this issue, but they were not deployed quickly enough, to prevent this exploit.
Attackers leveraged the "Least Recently Used" logic to breach the hardware layer from the software layer, leading to one of the most significant threats in history.
Major companies were hesitant to release information until they had a firm solution to ensure public safety.
This talk will showcase how the attack was carried out and what countermeasures were implemented to stop this exploit from being carried out in today's world.
The Illusion of Safety Superimposed on a System Prioritizing Performance
Over the years, in their pursuit of fine-tuning hardware architecture to meet our aspirations of performance and safety, designers faced a fundamental question: which one can we deliver to the public while maintaining their trust that this is a secure system?
However, this delicate balance was shattered when a fatal flaw was discovered, affecting modern architectures in a way that wasn't fully preventable by software patches alone.
Exeter Cyber Security Society
Cyber Security Master's Student and President of Cyber Security Society.
