Term · Safety & Security
Meltdown
A transient execution attack in which an out-of-order processor loads privileged memory before the permission fault retires, leaving a cache trace that lets an unprivileged process read kernel memory.
- Also known as
- Rogue data cache load
- Type
- Term
- Domain
- Safety & Security, Hardware attacks
Notes
Mitigated in software by kernel page table isolation at a performance cost, and closed in hardware in later cores.
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