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Comment by torgard | Hacker News Reader

> Intel said its chips, which power Macs and devices from other manufacturers, contain the flaw as well as processors based on ARM Holdings architecture, which is used in iOS devices and Android smartphones.

Has it been proven that Meltdown can affect ARM processors, or is this Intel speculation?

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Google tested a Proof-of-Concept exploit against an ARM Cortex A57.

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privi...

disclaimer: I work at Google, but not on Project Zero.

According to ARM yes, but only on a few architectures: https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update (Meltdown is CVE-2017-5754 and is responsible for Variant 3 and Variant 3a). See also https://github.com/marcan/speculation-bugs/blob/master/READM... which tries to summarize every known attack/platform/mitigation.

Cache timing attacks are a pretty general technique, and just depends on the combination of speculative execution + not flushing the cache upon misprediction rollback (which would be very expensive).

It would be a huge surprise if ARM were somehow immune.

It can impact them, just not to the same extreme. I believe ARM is only impacted when data is user space to user space.

Meltdown affects Intel chips, Spectre affects Intel, AMD, and ARM chips.

Meltdown also affects some ARM chips according to ARM itself: https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update

Spectre likely affects any chip with speculative execution, regardless of vendor, even things like Power8. So that's fun.

"We have people everywhere" - Mr White.

Did Google name it Spectre after the the James Bond movie?

And I thought AMD put out a release saying they are not affected.

I imagine it was named Spectre because it's going to be haunting us for years to come.

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