Spectre of contamination

Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution

Modern processors use branch prediction and speculative execution to maximize performance. For example, if the destination of a branch depends on a memory value that is in the process of being read, CPUs will try guess the destination and attempt to execute ahead. When the memory value finally arrives, the CPU either discards or commits the speculative computation. Speculative logic is unfaithf...

Human cloning spectre rises again

Has a clone baby been born or hasn't it? Or is one on the way? If so, where? Unproven claims and counterclaims have left the world in a profound uncertainty. At the time of writing, neither the company Clonaid nor the fertility doctor Severino Antinori have produced evidence for the assertion that their cloning experiments have been successful. In theory, these claims would be easy to prove or ...

Spectre: An Improved Phantom Edge Finder

Both edge finders use the topological sum to remove noise from second difference responses, so that zero-crossings in these responses represent reliable boundaries. Spectre applies the same techniques to a combination of first and third differences, producing a new map that reliably distinguishes real boundaries from spurious boundaries appearing in staircase intensity patterns. Similar process...

Security Update:Meltdown and Spectre Side-Channel Vulnerabilities

SPECTRE: A Fast and Scalable Cryptocurrency Protocol

A growing body of research on Bitcoin and other permissionless cryptocurrencies that utilize Nakamoto’s blockchain has shown that they do not easily scale to process a high throughput of transactions, or to quickly approve individual transactions; blocks must be kept small, and their creation rates must be kept low in order to allow nodes to reach consensus securely. As of today, Bitcoin proces...