Read the Meltdown and KAISER papers and answer the following questions.
Suppose you want to run an evil application that tries to steal a password from a web server running on the same machine, using Meltdown. Briefly describe the steps of the attack. Be specific.
Briefly describe how KAISER/KPTI prevents the above attack.
Whose responsibility do you think it is to prevent such attacks, the OS kernel, the CPU, user applications, or something else?
Provide a list of questions you would like to discuss in class. Feel free to provide any comments on the papers and related topics.
Extra credit: Section 7.2 of the Meltdown paper says that “[d]ue to the design of the x86 architecture, several privileged memory locations are required to be mapped in user space.” Provide one example of such memory locations.
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