14 DAY TRIAL // Just in case you were wondering, Raspberry Pi Foundation founder Eben Upton confirmed today that none of the Raspberry Pi devices are affected by the recently disclosed Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.
Earlier this week, two major hardware bugs were unearthed in modern processors, affecting almost all devices powered by some CPUs from Intel, AMD, or ARM made in the past two decades. The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are considered the worst chip flaw ever discovered, putting billions of devices at risk of attacks.
In a lengthy post published on Friday, Raspberry Pi Founder Eben Upton explains what the side-channel attack is and how speculative execution works on modern processors, claming that all Raspberry Pi models are immune to the Meltdown and Spectre security exploits as they use ARM1176, Cortex-A7, and Cortex-A53 processors.
"Modern processors go to great lengths to preserve the abstraction that they are in-order scalar machines that access memory directly, while in fact using a host of techniques including caching, instruction reordering, and speculation to deliver much higher performance than a simple processor could hope to achieve," says Eben Upton. "The lack of speculation in the ARM1176, Cortex-A7, and Cortex-A53 cores used in Raspberry Pi render us immune to attacks of the sort."
It's good to have a Raspberry Pi
We bet that many of you out there using a Raspberry Pi as your main computing machine feel a lot more relaxed right now to find out the these tiny, single-board computers are immune to the Meltdown and Spectre attacks, which could be used by unprivileged attackers to steal sensitive data like passwords and encryption keys stored in the kernel memory.
Of course, this is even better news for the numerous Raspberry Pi hackers out there that use the tiny SBC in their innovative appliances or robots. So it's good to have a Raspberry Pi these days when most computers are affected by the Meltdown and Spectre exploits and they need to be patched against these attacks, which may affect the performance of the system.
Here you go: We do not believe any generation of Raspberry Pi hardware is susceptible to either the Spectre or Meltdown vulnerabilities. — Eben Upton (@EbenUpton) January 4, 2018