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Speculative execution has created at least two other bugs, Foreshadow and Zombieload, that essentially make Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology insecure. Intel allegedly attempted to delay the disclosure, as the company had already taken a big PR hit earlier that year with the first Spectre reveal. Mere months after researchers revealed Spectre, another group of security researchers prepared to disclose “Spectre Next Generation” family of new speculative-execution flaws. This isn’t just a theory, and it has already happened several times since the original disclosure of the Meltdown and Spectre flaws (in less than two years).
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This is also why although specific variants of Spectre can be fixed in software or can even be mitigated in hardware, new variants will keep being discovered by researchers until the CPU makers decide enough is enough and disable the speculative execution feature altogether, or design entirely new architectures. If these tasks are needed, then they are more easily accessed when needed, and thus the performance of the CPU increases compared to if this feature didn’t exist. Speculative execution is a CPU design feature that allows a CPU to work on some tasks that may or may not be needed next. However, newly discovered side-channel attacks from the Spectre family seem to affect Intel more than the other two vendors, which implies that Intel may have taken more liberties with its CPUs than its competitors to keep the performance edge.
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Spectre affects virtually all out-of-order CPUs that use speculative execution to increase performance, including AMD and Arm’s processors. The Spectre vulnerability breaks the security boundary between different applications, making even those applications that follow best coding practices become vulnerable to attackers that exploit this side-channel security hole in PCs. Attackers can use this to access the memory of other applications and the operating system, thus allowing them to steal secrets.
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It allowed third-party code to break down the isolation between applications and the operating system that is normally enforced by hardware. The Meltdown flaw, also called Spectre variant 3, affected both Intel and ARM CPUs.