Upcoming windows 10 update will avoid slowing down specter

Two vulnerabilities were discovered earlier this year that affect current processors. Named as Specter and Meltdown, these speculative execution vulnerabilities meant that hackers could steal data simply by visiting a website.

Retpoline will be the solution to the loss of performance by Specter and Meltdown

Although there were no known incidents from these vulnerabilities, processor microcode patches could have up to a 30% impact on the performance of PCs that have been patched. Several tech companies have been working on mitigating this, and in Microsoft's latest move, they are working to implement Retpoline in the next major release of Windows 10 that will be released early next year.

We recommend reading our post on MIT researchers find a way to protect against Specter and Meltdown

Retpoline as a mitigation strategy exchanges indirect branches for returns, to avoid using predictions that come from BTB, as they can be poisoned by an attacker. The problem with Skylake + is that an RSB overflow, resorts to using a BTB prediction, which allows the attacker to take control of the speculation.

Yes, we have enabled retpoline by default in our 19H1 flights along with what we call "import optimization" to further reduce perf impact due to indirect calls in kernel-mode. Combined, these reduce the perf impact of Specter v2 mitigations to noise-level for most scenarios.

- Mehmet Iyigun (@mamyun) October 18, 2018

All of this means Specter will no longer make our processors feel slower, and overall it will make Specter mitigation only impact 1-2% for most use cases, which is certainly good news.. However, Microsoft doesn't appear to be planning to endorse the solution, which means Windows 10 users will need to upgrade to the latest version of the operating system to regain its performance, which is somewhat controversial, especially for business users who prefer a System. Well tested and stable operating. What do you think of the arrival of Retpoline in Windows 10?

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