Reply To: Meltdown and Spectre

The scary thing about this is that it’s an attack on how speculation works in the context of caches and prediction in very general terms.

Mill has a lot of things going for it: like returning NaR in loads without permission, not being OOO, and turning traditionally branch-heavy code into linear code with a pick at the end (basically auto-converting tons of code into constant-time algorithms for free… which might turn out to be an important *security* feature now that I think about it).

So it looks like some of these attacks are straightforwardly not possible on the mill. But other attacks seem so general… Spectre is essentially a whole new category of timing attacks. I’d like to hear the mill team’s initial impressions.