Spectre is a class of speculative execution CPU vulnerabilities that involve side-channel attacks, first discovered in 2017. There are multiple variants that affect modern microprocessors capable of performing branch prediction and other forms of speculative execution. On most processors, the speculative execution resulting from a branch misprediction may leave observable side effects that may reveal private data to attackers. For example, if the pattern of memory accesses performed by such speculative execution depends on private data, the resulting state of the data cache constitutes a side-channel through which an attacker may be able to extract information about the private data using a timing attack.
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