Microprocessors and security.

Summary
Nowadays more and more smart devices appear in our world, making our life
better and easier. All technologies are unique inventions and each computer has its
own amazing abilities to entertain people, help them work, and even respond to
voice commands are. But, of course, all these abilities are the results of decades of
technological development and innovation in microprocessor design. But despite
all the advantages, there are certain disadvantages due to which, even in the 21st
century, there are many data leaks, and we cannot fully protect our data.
Recently, security researchers have found that some innovations have let secrets
flow freely out of computer hardware the same way software vulnerabilities have
led to cyberattacks and data breaches. The best known recent examples were the
chip flaws nicknamed Spectre and Meltdown that affected billions of computers,
smartphones and other electronic devices. So, Spectre and Meltdown - are
hardware vulnerabilities of the category, side channel leak, found in a number of
microprocessors, in particular, made by Intel and the ARM architecture. These
errors allow malicious user applications running on a given computer to gain read
access to arbitrary locations in the computer memory used by the victim process,
such as other applications (that is, to break memory isolation between programs).
Most computer systems using high-performance microprocessors are susceptible to
these attacks, including personal computers, servers, laptops and a number of
mobile devices. In particular, such attacks have been demonstrated on processors
manufactured by Intel, AMD and on chips using ARM processor cores. Moreover,
there is already a variant of attacks that uses JavaScript programs to gain access to
the memory of browsers (reading data from other sites or data stored in the
browser)
In light of these concerning statistics, Army scientists and engineers have
developed a microprocessor computer system for secure, high-assurance, safety-
critical computing. The architecture leverages an array of cache controllers and
cache bank modules, with the latter comprising cache bank hardware permission
bits and memory cell hardware permission bits for managing access to system
resources. The design also includes a computer security framework subsystem of a
hierarchy of access layers in which the top layers are completely trusted, and the
lower layers are moderately trusted to completely untrusted.
To sum up, I can say that these smart technologies are a fast-growing industry, that
has its own advantages and disadvantages. And given the number of data breaches
and amount of information stolen from computer networks, it’s clear that
conventional computer architectures do not adequately support cybersecurity.