You might have noticed a recent hardware security bug that affects basically all modern processors. As is becoming "standard", the issue was given its own name. Two names, actually: Spectre and Meltdown. The discovery is kind of a small revolution with a potential to shake the IT industry, since this is a completely new class of security problems.

Unfortunately, the media often offers distorted information and forums are full of ungrounded assumptions and misleading information, lacking deeper understanding of the problem.

This presentation will explain in detail the core of these issues, the options of fixing them and how those solutions will impact performance. In the first part, we will talk about how modern processors operate. In the second part, we will introduce the three discovered vulnerabilities (Spectre 1, Spectre 2 and Meltdown) along with methods of protecting against them on a software level. If there's enough interest, the presentation may be followed by a discussion.

Attendees are expected to understand at least the basics of CPU functionality (in particular, what instructions and registers are) and to have an idea of how caches work.

Expected length: 2 hours

Presenter: Jiří Benc, Linux Kernel Developer at Red Hat

Red Hat Open Source Lab, E228
24.1.2018 14:00

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/538959989795245/