Spooked about Spectre

After a brief discussion about cryptocurrency, Chris and Soroush discuss the CPU vulnerabilites that made news recently: Meltdown and Spectre.

Kodak Debuts Bitcoin Miner as Blockchain Pivot Juices Stock Price
Coinbase
Dogecoin Market Cap Hits $1 Billion, to Its Creator’s Dismay
Chris’s Meltdown & Spectre reading list
Wired: A Critical Intel Flaw Breaks Basic Security for Most Computers
Google Project Zero: Reading privileged memory with a side-channel
Meltdown and Spectre
Ad blockers
iMore: Best ad blockers for iOS
Better
Adblock Plus
uBlock Origin
NoScript
Apple: About the security content of macOS High Sierra 10.13.2, Security Update 2017-002 Sierra, and Security Update 2017-005 El Capitan
Mitigations for Chrome and Firefox
A Timing Attack In Action
Coding Rules (cryptocoding.net)

Some more advanced & background reading on Meltdown and Spectre:

In-Order vs. Out-of-Order Execution (PDF)
Branch Prediction (PDF)
A brief history of branch prediction
CPU Cache (Wikipedia)
Understanding Cache Attacks (PDF)
Memory Protection (Wikipedia)
Spectre mitigation approach from Google: Retpoline: a software construct for preventing branch-target-injection

Comment from Chris after the show was posted:

Hi, all! I really struggled through my first Spectre explanation in this episode, but if you skip ahead to about 21:20 I think our discussion gets easier to follow. — Chris