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I’d highly recommend reading Flush+Reload first since the cache side channel is key to any of these miceoarchitectural attacks.

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As someone who followed a course on all of this, this is indeed how we started out.

1. Read Flush + Reload

2. Then reproduce it in C

3. Then read Meltdown

4. Reproduce it in C

5. Read Spectre

6. Reproduce it in C

After that we had to implement a VUSEC paper. I chose GLitch [1].

[1] https://www.vusec.net/projects/glitch/

Keep in mind that getting meltdown to work might be very difficult depending on your setup. I wouldn't have been able to at least when starting out my teacher didn't provide us with targetable hardware.

A spectre (particularly RSB-based ones) are nice to start out with imo.

Yea fair, this is obviously a high level overview. I think I found with meltdown that I needed the assembly code. I also was able to reproduce it with actual C code if I recall correctly but that was way more finnicky.

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