Speculative Execution CPU Vulnerabilities

Transient execution CPU vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities in which instructions, most often optimized using speculative execution, are executed temporarily by a microprocessor, without committing their results due to a misprediction or error, resulting in leaking secret data to an unauthorized party. The archetype is Spectre, and transient execution attacks like Spectre belong to the cache-attack category, one of several categories of side-channel attacks. Since January 2018 many different cache-attack vulnerabilities have been identified.

Overview

Modern computers are highly parallel devices, composed of components with very different performance characteristics. If an operation (such as a branch) cannot yet be performed because some earlier slow operation (such as a memory read) has not yet completed, a microprocessor may attempt to ''predict'' the result of the earlier operation and execute the later operation ''speculatively'', acting as if the prediction were correct. The prediction may be based on recent behavior of the system. When the earlier, slower operation completes, the microprocessor determines whether the prediction was correct or incorrect. If it was correct then execution proceeds uninterrupted; if it was incorrect then the microprocessor rolls back the speculatively executed operations and repeats the original instruction with the real result of the slow operation. Specifically, a ''transient instruction'' refers to an instruction processed by error by the processor (incriminating the branch predictor in the case of Spectre) which can affect the micro-architectural state of the processor, leaving the architectural state without any trace of its execution.

In terms of the directly visible behavior of the computer it is as if the speculatively executed code "never happened". However, this speculative execution may affect the state of certain components of the microprocessor, such as the cache, and this effect may be discovered by careful monitoring of the timing of subsequent operations.

If an attacker can arrange that the speculatively executed code (which may be directly written by the attacker, or may be a suitable ''gadget'' that they have found in the targeted system) operates on secret data that they are unauthorized to access, and has a different effect on the cache for different values of the secret data, they may be able to discover the value of the secret data.

Timeline

2018

In early January 2018, it was reported that all Intel processors made since 1995 (besides Intel Itanium and pre-2013 Intel Atom) have been subject to two security flaws dubbed Meltdown and Spectre.

The impact on performance resulting from software patches is "workload-dependent". Several procedures to help protect home computers and related devices from the Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities have been published. Spectre patches have been reported to significantly slow down performance, especially on older computers; on the newer 8th-generation Core platforms, benchmark performance drops of 2–14% have been measured. Meltdown patches may also produce performance loss. It is believed that "hundreds of millions" of systems could be affected by these flaws.
More security flaws were disclosed on May 3, 2018, on August 14, 2018, on January 18, 2019, and on March 5, 2020.

At the time, Intel was not commenting on this issue.

On March 15, 2018, Intel reported that it will redesign its CPUs (performance losses to be determined) to protect against the Spectre security vulnerability, and expects to release the newly redesigned processors later in 2018.

On May 3, 2018, eight additional Spectre-class flaws were reported. Intel reported that they are preparing new patches to mitigate these flaws.

On August 14, 2018, Intel disclosed three additional chip flaws referred to as L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF). They reported that previously released microcode updates, along with new, pre-release microcode updates can be used to mitigate these flaws.

2019

On January 18, 2019, Intel disclosed three new vulnerabilities affecting all Intel CPUs, named "Fallout", "RIDL", and "ZombieLoad", allowing a program to read information recently written, read data in the line-fill buffers and load ports, and leak information from other processes and virtual machines. Coffee Lake-series CPUs are even more vulnerable, due to hardware mitigations for Spectre.

2020

On March 5, 2020, computer security experts reported another Intel chip security flaw, besides the Meltdown and Spectre flaws, with the systematic name (or "Intel CSME Bug"). This newly found flaw is not fixable with a firmware update, and affects nearly "all Intel chips released in the past five years".

2021

In March 2021 AMD security researchers discovered that the Predictive Store Forwarding algorithm in Zen 3 CPUs could be used by malicious applications to access data it shouldn't be accessing. According to Phoronix there's little performance impact in disabling the feature.

In June 2021, two new vulnerabilities, Speculative Code Store Bypass (SCSB
CVE-2021-0086
and Floating Point Value Injection (FPVI
CVE-2021-0089
, affecting ''all'' modern x86-64 CPUs both from Intel and AMD were discovered. In order to mitigate them software has to be rewritten and recompiled. ARM CPUs are not affected by SCSB but some certain ARM architectures are affected by FPVI.

Also in June 2021, MIT researchers revealed the PACMAN attack on Pointer Authentication Codes (PAC) in ARM v8.3A.

In August 2021 a vulnerability called "Transient Execution of Non-canonical Accesses" affecting certain AMD CPUs was disclosed. It requires the same mitigations as the MDS vulnerability affecting certain Intel CPUs. It was assigne
CVE-2020-12965
Since most x86 software is already patched against MDS and this vulnerability has the exact same mitigations, software vendors don't have to address this vulnerability.

In October 2021 for the first time ever a vulnerability similar to Meltdown was disclosed to be affecting all AMD CPUs however the company doesn't think any new mitigations have to be applied and the existing ones are already sufficient.

2022

In March 2022, a new variant of the Spectre vulnerability called Branch History Injection was disclosed. It affects certain ARM64 CPUs and the following Intel CPU families: Cascade Lake, Ice Lake, Tiger Lake and Alder Lake. According to Linux kernel developers AMD CPUs are also affected.

In March 2022, a vulnerability affecting a wide range of AMD CPUs was disclosed unde
CVE-2021-26341

In June 2022, multiple MMIO Intel CPUs vulnerabilities related to execution in virtual environments were announced. The following CVEs were designated
CVE-2022-21123CVE-2022-21125CVE-2022-21166

In July 2022, the Retbleed vulnerability was disclosed affecting Intel Core 6 to 8th generation CPUs and AMD Zen 1, 1+ and 2 generation CPUs. Newer Intel microarchitectures as well as AMD starting with Zen 3 are not affected. The mitigations for the vulnerability decrease the performance of the affected Intel CPUs by up to 39%, while AMD CPUs lose up to 14%.

In August 2022, the SQUIP vulnerability was disclosed affecting Ryzen 2000–5000 series CPUs. According to AMD the existing mitigations are enough to protect from it.

According to a Phoronix review released in October, 2022 Zen 4/ Ryzen 7000 CPUs are not slowed down by mitigations, in fact disabling them leads to a performance loss.

2023

In February 2023 a vulnerability affecting a wide range of AMD CPU architectures called "Cross-Thread Return Address Predictions" was disclosed.

In July 2023 a critical vulnerability in the Zen 2 AMD microarchitecture called Zenbleed was made publi

AMD released a microcode update to fix it.

In August 2023 a vulnerability in AMD's Zen 1, Zen 2, Zen 3, and Zen 4 microarchitectures called Inception was revealed and assigne
CVE-2023-20569
According to AMD it is not practical but the company will release a microcode update for the affected products.

Also in August 2023 a new vulnerability called Downfall or Gather Data Sampling was disclosed, affecting Intel CPU Skylake, Cascade Lake, Cooper Lake, Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Amber Lake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, Comet Lake & Rocket Lake CPU families. Intel will release a microcode update for affected products.

The SLAM vulnerability (Spectre based on Linear Address Masking) reported in 2023 neither has received a corresponding CVE, nor has been confirmed or mitigated against.

2024

In March 2024, a variant of Spectre-V1 attack called GhostRace was published. It was claimed it affected all the major microarchitectures and vendors, including Intel, AMD and ARM. It was assigne
CVE-2024-2193
AMD dismissed the vulnerability (calling it "Speculative Race Conditions (SRCs)") claiming that existing mitigations were enough. Linux kernel developers chose not to add mitigations citing performance concerns. The Xen hypervisor project released patches to mitigate the vulnerability but they are not enabled by default.

Also in March 2024, a vulnerability in Intel Atom processors called Register File Data Sampling (RFDS) was revealed. It was assigne
CVE-2023-28746
Its mitigations incur a slight performance degradation.

In April 2024, it was revealed that the BHI vulnerability in certain Intel CPU families could be still exploited in Linux entirely in user space without using any kernel features or root access despite existing mitigations. Intel recommended "additional software hardening". The attack was assigne
CVE-2024-2201

In June 2024, Samsung Research and Seoul National University researchers revealed the TikTag attack against the Memory Tagging Extension in ARM v8.5A CPUs. The researchers created PoCs for Google Chrome and the Linux kernel. Researchers from VUSec previously revealed ARM's Memory Tagging Extension is vulnerable to speculative probing.

In July 2024, UC San Diego researchers revealed the Indirector attack against Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs leveraging high-precision Branch Target Injection (BTI). Intel downplayed the severity of the vulnerability and claimed the existing mitigations are enough to tackle the issue. No CVE was assigned.

2025

In January 2025, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers published two whitepapers on Data Speculation Attacks via Load Address Prediction on Apple Silicon (SLAP) and Breaking the Apple M3 CPU via False Load Output Predictions (FLOP).

Also in January 2025, Arm disclosed a vulnerability () in which an unprivileged context can trigger a data memory-dependent prefetch engine to fetch data from a privileged location, potentially leading to unauthorized access. To mitigate the issue, Arm recommends disabling the affected prefetcher by setting CPUACTLR6_EL1 1

In May 2025, VUSec released three vulnerabilities extending on Spectre-v2 in various Intel and ARM architectures under the moniker Training Solo. Mitigations require a microcode update for Intel CPUs and changes in the Linux kernel.
* The history-based attack affects all Intel CPUs with eIBRS, including the latest as of 2025, Intel’s latest generation Lion Cove which features the BHI_NO feature and selected ARM microarchitectures.
* Indirect Target Selection (ITS) () affects Intel Core 9th-11th generations and Intel Xeon 2nd-3rd generations.
* Lion Cove BPU issue () affects the Lion Cove core, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake.

Also in May 2025, ETH Zurich Computer Security Group "COMSEC" disclosed the Branch Privilege Injection vulnerability affecting all Intel x86 architectures starting from the 9th generation (Coffee Lake Refresh) under . A microcode update is required to mitigate it. It comes with a performance cost up to 8%.

Future

Spectre class vulnerabilities will remain unfixed because otherwise CPU designers will have to disable speculative execution which will entail a massive performance loss. Despite this, AMD has managed to design Zen 4 such a way its performance is ''not'' affected by mitigations.

Vulnerabilities and mitigations summary

* Various CPU microarchitectures not included above are also affected, among them are ARM, IBM Power, MIPS and others. Vulnerabilities starting with SLAM are not included in the table. It only exists as historical evidence because it doesn't include newer AMD and Intel x86 architectures.

** The 8th generation Coffee Lake architecture in this table also applies to a wide range of previously released Intel CPUs, not limited to the architectures based on Intel Core, Pentium 4 and Intel Atom starting with Silvermont.

Notes

References

External links

Linux kernel docs: Hardware vulnerabilities
*

Vulnerabilities associated with CPU speculative execution

A systematic evaluation of transient execution attacks and defenses

A dynamic tree of transient execution vulnerabilities for Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs

Transient Execution Attacks by Daniel Gruss, June 20, 2019

CPU Bugs

{{Hacking in the 2010s

Computer security exploits
Hardware bugs
Side-channel attacks