Everyone is talking about the new Specter and Meltdown CPU flaws. But I think most people don't really know what it is in detail and how it could affect their daily lives. Cryptocurrencies are booming these days and even many non-tech-savvy people are in the market. Therefore, I have written a short summary regarding the technical details of Meltdown and Specter and their effects on cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayThese are vulnerabilities that affect CPUs manufactured by Intel, AMD, and ARM. The meltdown had already been discovered in 2017 but made public on January 3, 2018 by two companies, Cerberus Security and Google ProjectZero, as well as by the Technical University of Graz. Specter was identified by Google Project Zero and researcher Paul Kosher. Both vulnerabilities affect Windows, Linux, MacOS and other operating systems and affect all devices such as mobile phones, laptops, desktops and servers. There are two different variations of Specter and one variant of Meltdown. The meltdown is affecting almost all modern Intel chips and the two Specter variants are affecting the least Intel, AMD and ARM chips. The meltdown and the two types of Specter attacks are exploiting a process within CPUs that speeds up the processing of any given code without loss of performance while guessing what the next process will be. Each time this process runs a small change will be made to the processor. Unfortunately this change can also be measured by other programs, which means that the information can also be disclosed to malicious programs. Specter uses JavaScript to steal the leaked information while Meltdown leaks the information inside the kernel memory. Modern operating systems use page tables to map kernel memory or processes and the physical memory of the system and divide it into two parts, one for processes and one for the kernel. Since kernel memory is shared for all processes, Meltdown takes advantage of this shared memory, finding leaks in the data and forwarding it to third parties. Specter could be exploited in a CPU to make incorrect predictions and execute malicious code instead of predictive code. With the second version of Spectre, an attacker could trick the CPU into making incorrect speculative accesses outside its boundaries, leading the CPU away from the normal prediction to the one the attacker wanted. Both Specter vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to access data on the chips, meaning encryption keys, passwords, and other sensitive information could be exfiltrated. Whenever the CPU guesses what information is needed to continue its process, the attacker could see the data. Specter allows an attacker to start the guessing process by measuring the time it takes to perform this task, so the process can be taken over by a third-party process. This could lead to buffer overflow attacks, for example. Bad news for all administrators, Specter also affects virtualized machines. Meltdown requires a smaller skill set to exploit than Spectre. It allows a third-party process to read data directly from the kernel and allows the attacker to view the data. These attacks are so-called “side-channel attacks” and access data while it is being used for legitimate processes. The vulnerability does not depend on a specific vendor, as often reported.