Xen Developer & Design Summit 2018

Spectre and Meltdown were issues disclosed at the beginning
of this year. Unlike previous bugs, they represent not simple
mistakes, but the failure of a fundamental assumption that processor
designers have been making for years.

This talk will briefly give an overview of speculation, and how the
Spectre and Meltdown attacks work at a high level. It will then give
an analysis of how difficult these vulnerabilities are to exploit in
Xen, and how the various mitigations work. Finally, I'll describe
what I've been calling Panopticon, an approach that should be able to
mitigate the worst effects of any future speculation bug.