AnandTech's Journal

AMD Issues Updated Speculative Spectre Security Status: Predictive Store Forwarding

The mention of Spectre and Meltdown is enough to send chills down any InfoSec spine. A number of these batches of security vulnerabilities deal with speculative execution, and how a processor might leak data while executing code in a speculative manner. This week AMD has pre-empted the security space by detailing a potential security concerns regarding its new Zen 3-based Predictive Store Forwarding feature designed to improve code performance by predicting dependencies between loads and stores. AMD is clear to point out that most users will not need to take any action, as the risk for general consumer use to any breach is low, and no known code is vulnerable.