Google’s security researchers with the now famous Project Zero, disclosed yesterday two vulnerabilities, named Meltdown and Spectre.
Even as the new year starts, this could be 2018’s largest vulnerability discovery, as it affects all software running on Intel processors, regardless of Operating System.
Basically, every Intel processor after 1995 is affected. The vulnerability exploits “out of order execution”
The large group of researchers collaborated from “University of Pennsylvania, University of Maryland, Graz University of Technology, Cyberus Technology, Rambus Cryptography Research Division, University of Adelaide and Data61 along with researchers at GPZ.”
Please see the whitepaper on Spectre here: https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf and the Meltdown here: https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf