Video Boffins in America, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have devised a Spectre-style attack on modern processors that can defeat defenses that are supposed to stop malicious software from hijacking a computer's operating system. The end result is exploit code able to bypass a crucial protection mechanism and take over a device to hand over root access.
That's a lot to unpack so we'll start from the top. Let's say you find a security vulnerability, such as a buffer overflow, in the kernel of an OS like Linux. Your aim is to use this programming flaw to execute code within the kernel so that you can take over the whole machine or device. One way to do this, and sidestep things like stack cookies and the prevention of data execution, is to use return-orientated programming (ROP). This involves chaining together snippets of instruction sequences in the kernel to ..
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