security

The revelations by Google’s Project Zero team earlier this year of the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities in most of processors that have powered servers and PCs for the past couple of decades shook the industry as Intel and other chip makers scrambled to mitigate the risk of the threats in the short term and then implement plans to incorporate the mitigation techniques into future versions of the silicon. …

The increasingly distributed nature of computing and the rapid growth in the number of the small connected devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT) are combining with trends like the rise of silicon-level vulnerabilities highlighted by Spectre, Meltdown, and more recent variants to create an expanding and fluid security landscape that’s difficult for enterprises to navigate. …

Computing is hard enough, but the sophistication and proliferation of attacks on IT infrastructure, from the firewall moat surrounding the corporate network all the way down into the guts of the operating system kernel and deep into the speculative execution units on the physical processor, make the task of computing – with confidence – doubly difficult. …