The thesis aims to explore and describe the vulnerabilities of modern processors to Meltdown and Spectre attacks. First, the operation of modern processors and the CPU architectural slutions exploited by the attacks is described. The pipeline structure of superscalar processors, branch prediction, speculative execution of instructions, and memory hierarchy are described. This is followed by a description of each attack, how it works and what are the solutions for it. The description of the attacks is written with an explanation on concrete cases for easier understanding. Finally, findings on the prevalence of attacks on ARM processors follow, followed by an analysis of the specific number of vulnerable processors.
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