The 2018 Pwnie Winner For Most Innovative Research

Spectre/Meltdown

Credit: Jann Horn, Paul Kocher, Daniel Genkin, Mike Hamburg, Moritz Lipp, Yval Yarom, Werner Haas, Thomas Prescher, Daniel Gruss, Stefan Mangard, Michael Schwarz

Remember when ASLR stopped exploitation? Neither do we, but we definitely did not anticipate this new era of hardware-based memory disclosure oracles. Given the overwhelming amount of possibilities opened up by flirting-up branch predictors and measuring cache retrieval, there have probably been new variants of Spectre announced since you began reading this sentence. Don’t mind the sound of the fans humming as you read, and thank you visiting the Pwnies nominations page!

Spectre/Meltdown