Meltdown and Spectre reveal that perfect information protection comes at an increasingly steep cost.

In the field of data security, 2018 began with a jolt. The revelation of the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities has taught us that in 2018 (and beyond), nothing is sacred.

Speculative execution, the architectural concept that is exploited in the Spectre vulnerability, has been in use by mainframe processors since the mid-1970s. It is taught in Computer Architecture 101 in universities around the world. And yet, it turns out that the security implications were never fully understood until about seven months ago.

Out-of-order execution, the culprit in the Meltdown vulnerability, is also a ubiquitous concept, although Meltdown is easily avoided with a better implementation of the concept.