How to live in a post-meltdown and -spectre world

Abstract

THE WORLD OF vulnerability management is rapidly changing to keep pace with the complexity of potential threats requiring remediation. What will it look like to live in this world for the next 10 to 15 years? In 1996, Aleph One published “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit.”1 For the next decade, stack smashing was a common form of exploitation, and the security community expended significant effort to finding defenses against it. The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities may constitute an equally seminal moment, ushering in a decade or more of chronic risk-management issues. Indeed, two.