We’ve discussed said flaws in more detail in the past, but the gist is that virtually all modern processors take advantage of a technique called “speculative execution” to boost performance and speed up calculations.
Unfortunately, that has come at a cost: Meltdown and Spectre (and their many known or unknown variants) theoretically allow attackers to swipe personal data stored in browsers, password managers, and other parts of a given machine without leaving any evidence behind.
Patches have rolled out for these flaws, but they aren’t ideal.
