Typical severity: Very High. Likelihood of attack: Low. An adversary exploits a hardware design flaw in a CPU implementation of transient instruction execution to expose sensitive data and bypass/subvert access control over restricted resources. Typically, the adversary conducts a covert channel attack to target non-discarded microarchitectural changes caused by transient executions such as speculative execution, branch prediction, instruction pipelining, and/or out-of-order execution. The transient execution results in a series of instructions (gadgets) which construct covert channel and access/transfer the secret data.
Implementation: DAWG (Dynamically Allocated Way Guard) - processor cache properly divided between different programs/processes that don't share resources | Implementation: KPTI (Kernel Page-Table Isolation) to completely separate user-space and kernel space page tables | Configuration: Architectural Design of Microcode to limit abuse of speculative execution and out-of-order execution | Configuration: Disable SharedArrayBuffer for Web Browsers | Configuration: Disable Copy-on-Write between Cloud VMs