Mitigating speculative execution side channel hardware vulnerabilities – Security Research & Defense: "Side channel attacks consist of three phases: the priming phase which is used to place a system into a desired initial state (e.g. flushing cache lines), the triggering phase which is used to perform the action that conveys information through the side channel, and the observing phase which is used to detect the presence of the information conveyed through the side channel. These phases can occur architecturally (by actually executing instructions), or speculatively (through speculative execution).
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