Surely by now you’ve heard about the Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws, but you might not fully understand what the issue is and how you can protect yourself against the risks. We’re here to help. Here’s how these vulnerabilities affect your Apple devices and what you can so to keep them safe.
Meltdown and Spectre FAQ
One more time, what exactly is the issue here?
There are three separate potential security issues at play here, one named Meltdown and two named Spectre. They all take advantage of something called speculative execution. Basically, modern CPUs try to speed things up by taking educated guesses to predict what the next operation will be, and will go so far as to execute them ahead of time. If the prediction is correct, the CPU has an answer all ready to go. If it's incorrect, the “speculative execution” is removed. The whole process is nearly instantaneous and should be invisible to the software and OS. The Meltdown and Spectre bugs allow hackers to read and access this information in the OS kernel memory by taking advantage of the delay in its rollback.
