| Title | A Leaky Crystal Ball |
|---|---|
| Contributor | David H. Silver(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0526.18 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.18 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | David H. Silver |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2026-04-08 |
| Long abstract | Speculative execution optimizes performance by executing instructions before knowing if they’re needed, leaving microarchitectural traces in cache memory even when results are discarded. Attacks like Meltdown and Spectre exploit this by constructing code sequences where a secret value determines which memory addresses are accessed during speculation. By measuring which addresses load quickly afterward (indicating they were cached), attackers can determine if specific bits were 0 or 1 allowing secrets to be extracted across privilege boundaries. |
| Print length | 10 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
| THEMA |
|
| BISAC |
|
| Keywords |
|
| Landing Page | Full text URL | Platform | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0526/chapters/10.11647/obp.0526.18 | Landing page | https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0526.18.pdf | Full text URL |
David H. Silver is an industrial researcher whose career bridges computer vision, computational biology, and science communication. He studied mathematics, computer science, and biology at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology as a Rothschild Scholar, and was awarded a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for his doctoral work in computational biology at Cambridge, UK. Silver’s peer-reviewed publications span multiple domains: computational biology in Nature and PNAS; computer vision systems in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence; medical AI in Human Reproduction and MIDL; and entertainment analysis in PLoS One. He holds over a dozen patents in depth sensing, medical imaging, and generative AI. His industry positions include Algorithm Engineer at Intel Corporation, ML Researcher at Apple, and CTO/co-founder roles at several technology startups. Silver maintains academic collaborations with researchers worldwide and serves as a peer reviewer for Image and Vision Computing and PNAS.