Meltdown has definitely taken the internet by storm. The attack seems quite simple and elegant, yet the whitepaper leaves out critical details on the specific vulnerability. It relies mostly on a combination of cache timing side-channels and speculative execution that accesses globally mapped kernel pages.
This deep dive assumes some familiarity with CPU architecture and OS kernel behavior. Read the background section first for a primer on paging and memory protection.
This article has been indexed from DZone Security Zone