Welcome to 2018! A Meltdown and Spectre Run-Through

This report explains the Meltdown and Spectre speculative-execution CPU vulnerabilities, detailing how out-of-order and speculative execution can be abused to read protected memory across processes and VMs, lists affected hardware and CVEs, demonstrates exploit techniques (Flush+Reload, Prime+Probe, branch predictor training), and provides vendor remediation guidance and mitigation notes.