CPU Meltdown Exploit

Discovered in 2018, the Meltdown vulnerability exposed a critical flaw in modern CPU design, allowing attackers to bypass traditional memory boundaries and access sensitive data. The issue stemmed from the CPU's speculative execution mechanism, a performance enhancing feature common in most modern processors. Meltdown impacted a wide range of devices, from personal computers to cloud servers, forcing a coordinated global response from hardware vendors and OS developers.

Meltdown exploited a weakness in out-of-order execution, a CPU feature where instructions are processed nonsequentially to enhance speed. Attackers could leverage this to perform unauthorized reads from kernel memory space, even from low-privileged processes. The exploit used side-channel attacks to infer secret data from CPU cache behaviors. While software patches were rapidly issued to mitigate the flaw, they often introduced noticeable performance degradation. Long-term solutions require hardware redesigns emphasizing stricter memory isolation and speculative execution control.