A peek into Spectre
On January 3, 2018, there was a fundamental flaw discovered with the CPU architecture we've been using for the past 20 years. This has shaken modern security to its roots. While the workings of Spectre and Meltdown are highly complicated (and deeply interesting, if you like the security field), what you have to know right now is that because of Spectre, all major browser vendors have disabled SharedArrayBuffer
in browsers by default.
You can enable SharedArrayBuffer
by going to chrome://flags
and searching for SharedArrayBuffer
and enabling it.
The reason for disabling SharedArrayBuffer
is to mitigate Spectre, which is a dangerous but beautifully crafted exploit which requires a very precise measurement of time to attack. SharedArrayBuffer
provides a way for multiple threads to be accessible to every thread, and atomics add more precision over the data available. This can be used to create highly precise clocks using SharedArrayBuffer
, which can be used to carry out a Spectre...