CVE-2018-3640

An industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor handle speculative access of system registers inaccessible to unprivileged user. It relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code which allows speculative load of system registers and that such register value could be subsequently used in speculatively executed instructions that never actually commit (retire). As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this flaw to read privileged system registers by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks.