Researchers at MIT appear to be on the verge of developing a complete solution against the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities.
As soon as the year began, the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities that affect Intel, AMD and ARM processors were revealed, but that mainly affect Intel processors, everything is said. These vulnerabilities to average users do not affect excessively and mainly affect systems that run virtual machines by sharing different elements. Since it was discovered, many teams have worked on how to find effective solutions and it seems that MIT is very close to finding a solution.
MIT appears to be close to solving the problem of the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities.
Since these vulnerabilities have come to the fore, new variants of these vulnerabilities have been found such as: Specter Variant 1.1 and 1.2, Specter RSB and NetSpectre, which can be exploited remotely. Intel's Coffee Lake Refresh already have hardware protection for many of these vulnerabilities, some are corrected or reduced by microcode or different software patches. The MIT solution would completely fix the problems.
Research has focused on Intel's Cache Allocation Technology (CAT), which was introduced in processors in 2016 that improves security, but is not good enough to correct problems with the Specter and Meltdown processors.
The system that has been baptized as DAWG would offer a methodology that allows the isolation of each thread of the program from the rest without having a significant performance impact over CATm and would only need slight modifications in the operating system when it is implemented.
DAWG is an interesting solution that will protect current systems against Specter and Meltdown problems, but for now it will be a temporary and incomplete solution, as it is still under development and additional solutions will need to be developed in the future.
Source: TPU
