Note: Six days left to register for CppCon 2018 at the Early Bird discounted rate.

From the CppCon blog, one of this year's keynotes is on one of the hottest programming language topics of the year:

CppCon 2018 Plenary: Spectre: Secrets, Side-Channels, Sandboxes, and Security by Chandler Carruth

There will also be a followup panel of industry experts who have helped lead the software response to this problem. From the announcement:

Chandler, who leads the C++ and LLVM teams at Google ... is one of the lead engineers within Google and across the industry working to respond to these developments.

From his talk’s description:

The discovery of speculative execution side-channel attacks (called “Spectre”) fundamentally changes the security model of every modern superscalar microprocessor. Extracting secret data (credit cards, cryptographic keys) through side-channels is not new and has challenged the cryptographic community for decades. However, speculative execution attack techniques have fundamentally altered the ease and applicability of side-channels: far more code is impacted by these attacks and they can more reliably be weaponized. Responding to these issues has impacted CPU design, compiler design, library design, sandbox techniques and even the C++ programming language and standard.

This talk will explain how these kinds of attacks work at a high level and provide a clear set of terminology to describe these classes of vulnerabilities and attacks. It will show how the different variants work at the low level of modern hardware to give a detailed and precise understanding of the mechanics involved on CPUs today.

In addition to his plenary address, Chandler will participate in a panel discussion with other experts from across the industry who have helped lead this security incident response.

If you’re not sure what CppCon is like, here’s a sample attendee quote from a previous CppCon that came up randomly on the CppCon home page this morning:

“If you want to meet awesome people, spend a week in a fantastic city, and have your mind-blown by incredible speakers then look no further than CppCon. It is THAT good.”

The CppCon Early Bird discounted ticket rate is available for one more week. Register here for CppCon 2018, Sep 23-29!