Microsoft is aware of a new publicly disclosed class of vulnerabilities, called “speculative execution side-channel attacks,” that affect many operating systems and modern processors, including processors from Intel, AMD, and ARM. On the MSVC team, we’ve reviewed information in detail and conducted extensive tests, which showed the performance impact of the new /Qspectre switch to be negligible. This post is intended as a follow-up to Terry Myerson’s recent Windows System post with a focus on the assessment for MSVC. If you haven’t had a chance to read Terry’s post you should take a moment to read it before reading this one.
February 16th, 2018
Spectre mitigations in MSVC (C++ team blog)
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