MIT researchers find a way to protect against specter and meltdown

The announcement of the Specter and Meltdown families of vulnerabilities, found in the silicon itself of most modern processors in January, triggered the start of an annus horribilis for the semiconductor industry, in particular Intel, which remains the largest provider badly affected, and was forced to release security patches that impaired performance, and had an unfortunate tendency to crash systems. MIT appears to be close to a final solution.

MIT investigates the use of cache mapping technology to protect against Specter and Meltdown

Since the original variants were unveiled, new versions have come to light: Specter Variant 4, Variant 1.1 and 1.2, Specter RSB, and NetSpectre, which can be exploited remotely, to name just a handful. While the latest Intel CPUs include hardware protection against some variants, others rely on microcode or software patches, but a new protection technique from MIT researchers could solve the problem.

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The research team's work is based on Intel's Cache Mapping Technology (CAT), introduced in 2016 to improve security, but that didn't go far enough to avoid Specter and Meltdown. Named DAWG, the system provides a method of completely isolating each thread in the program from others, and most importantly, it has minimal performance impact above CATm and requires only minor modifications. in the operating system to implement.

While the DAWG shows promise for protection against current and future Specter and Meltdown attacks, it is not a panacea, the team notes that the system has not yet been developed to the point where it can protect itself against the full spectrum of currently known attacks, although confident that it can be done with future development.

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