Mitigating Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities

Speaker: David Woodhouse

Abstract

There has been a rush of development to cover the recently discovered CPU security flaws based on speculative execution, such as Spectre and Meltdown.

David will describe the techniques used for mitigating these problems, from improvements in the CPU through hypervisors, OS kernels, compilers and what can be done within applications themselves.

Biography

David is a Principal Engineer in Amazon's Kernel and Operating System team, working on Linux and Xen to support Amazon EC2.

David started hacking on Linux in 1995, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. He has since worked at Red Hat, and in Intel's Open Source Technology Center.

David was the primary developer of the Linux MTD subsystem for flash memory, and the JFFS2 flash file system. He also wrote the OpenConnect VPN client amongst other random distractions.

Twitter: @dwmw2