logoalt Hacker News

jnwatsontoday at 3:29 AM1 replyview on HN

No, NX precedes Spectre by a long shot. It was originally intended so an attacker couldn't use a buffer overflow to change the PC and execute directly out of the attacker-controlled buffer.


Replies

adrian_btoday at 4:07 AM

That is exactly what the poster to whom you replied said.

So Arm did not add another means to disable this kind of speculative execution, after Spectre was discovered, but they just reused the existing NX flag, expanding its functionality.