Replies to post #149776 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[Andy Grave]

Maybe someone could explain how one would do that

....Charlie has a reasonably understandable description.

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2018/01/04/kaiser-security-holes-will-devastate-intels-marketshare/

[Steeler]

https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf

Sections 3 and 5.1 explain the main parts of the attack in significant enough detail to get an idea of how it works. It's about 3 pages of text.

A one line explanation from section 7.1, after you get past the part where speculative execution is involved and before setting up the side channel to read from kernel addressible memory (everything):

Meltdown is some form of race condition between the
fetch of a memory address and the corresponding permission
check for this address.