I met my whole family through Baidu Tieba.

Shen Kang saw all these news reports when he was researching related materials in 2023.

But in reality, Shen Kang was completely unaware of what happened in 2018.

In 2018, Shen Kang was still living in a rented room. Every morning at seven o'clock, he would get up, buy a pancake from a roadside stall at the entrance of the community, and after boarding the bus, he would have the pancake in his mouth and his hands searching for his bus card in his wallet.

Once at the company, he would drink a cup of coffee and then immerse himself in work, creating endless reports and writing countless documents.

After getting off work, I went home, turned on my computer, and was ready to play a game of League of Legends to stomp some noobs, only to find that my damn N10 had automatically updated again.

After the update, my computer became even slower—but that's normal, that's just how the N10 is, it's both rogue and a pain, I'm used to it.

He thought that changing cards was just a normal occurrence for N10, like the morning rush hour and the end-of-month credit card bills, a natural part of life.

At that time, he didn't know that his computer's slowdown was the result of a global collaborative effort:

An Intel engineer on the other side of the ocean smoked half a pack of cigarettes in a conference room late at night, repeatedly weighing the performance loss of the patch against the vulnerability risk, and finally signed "la" at the end of the email.

A Microsoft kernel developer whose name he had never heard of worked overtime until 10 p.m., merging the code that would slow down tens of millions of computers into the nth monthly update. When he closed it, he glanced at the time and thought he could still catch the last subway.

An operations engineer from a cloud service provider was woken up by a phone call at 2 a.m. Still half-asleep, he connected to the VPN, checked the script three times, pressed enter, and watched as thousands of servers restarted one by one in the green logs. Then he typed "n" in the work group chat…

Shen Kang, sitting at his desk in that rented room, was completely unaware of all this.

He is just one of the most ordinary of the billions of ordinary users.

He wasn't even aware that he was being slowed down by the patch—he just habitually and naturally blamed the n10.

Then, I cursed "damn N10" at the screen, quit the game, shut down the computer, and went to sleep.

Five years later, he learned that what caused his League of Legends team fight to drop frames that night was not Microsoft's update strategy, but a cross-border, months-long emergency response to the largest hardware vulnerability in human history.

He himself, using a laptop worth three thousand yuan as a medium, and as a gamer experiencing lag during team battles, passively and unknowingly participated in this massive collective action across the entire industry.

The origin of all this lies in that name.

Ghost/Meltdown

……

Upon recalling this name, Shen Kang finally understood why he had felt he had heard "predictive execution" somewhere before when Xiao Bonian mentioned it.

Circuit breaking primarily utilizes the CPU's out-of-order execution mechanism.

The Ghost primarily utilizes the CPU's predictive execution mechanism.

As Xiao Bonian said, the predictive execution mechanism operates by "guessing." If the guess is correct, it executes; if the guess is wrong, it rolls back.

But as the saying goes, everything that goes by leaves a trace.

Predictive rollbacks will also leave traces, or "shadows," in the cache.

What attackers do with Spectre is to "trick" the CPU into doing something it shouldn't be doing, leaving a "shadow" of that action, and then reading that "shadow".

This is at the hardware level.

This is also what makes Ghost different from other traditional attack methods that target the system level.

for example:

It's like you own a library (computer) and there's a librarian in it.

The virus was like an outsider poisoning the librarian's water. The librarian drank it, became delirious, and then took out the books and gave them to the outsider.

The Trojan horse was essentially a "helpful bystander" who installed a "smart library management system" for the administrator, claiming it would improve efficiency. After installation, information about many books in the library was sent to a certain email address.

The scam involved someone sending an email to the administrator, signed "The Curator," saying, "Send information about a certain book to this email address." The administrator, seeing it was from "The Curator," complied.

Someone hired hundreds of people to flood into the library, causing chaos. The librarian couldn't handle it alone, and then some people took advantage of the chaos to steal the books he wanted.

Viruses, Trojans, and phishing attacks—these are all traceable.

As the curator, when you return, you find the administrator acting incoherently and making a peace sign, and you know something is wrong.

If you notice the addition of an "intelligent book management system," you'll know something's wrong.

If you check the accounts with the administrator and tell them you didn't send them any emails, you'll know something's wrong.

When you see the footprints all over the room, the door is broken, and the manager is disheveled, as if he had been gang-raped by eighteen burly men, you know something is wrong.

These methods are also relatively easy to prevent.

You can tell the administrators not to drink outside water, not to install any smart management systems randomly, and to call you first to confirm before acting on emails signed "Curator". You can also hire a group of security guards to stop hundreds of people from coming next time.

But ghosts are different.

The ghost was just a polite customer named Klein Moriarty.

He was wearing a dark suit jacket and vest, a white shirt underneath, dark trousers, a silk top hat, a cane in his hand, and a pocket watch.

Approaching the counter, he removed his hat, politely nodded slightly to the administrator, and spoke in his gentle, slightly scholarly voice:

"Hello, I would like to borrow the book 'Antigonus's Notebook'."

"It's a manuscript with a sheepskin cover, stamped with a copper emblem, supposedly left behind by that mad family from the Quaternary period. I heard that the museum has a sealed copy, numbered in the 'Forbidden Zone Books' section."

The administrator's workflow is: "When someone comes to borrow a book, first run to take the book down from the shelf, and then check the borrower's ID."

So the administrator went and brought over the "Antigonus Notebook".

Then, he returned to the counter, placed the parchment manuscript with the red copper emblem on the table, pressed his hands on the cover, raised his head, and formally examined the gentleman in front of him.

"Sir, please show me your library card."

Klein's expression showed just the right amount of hesitation.

He reached into the inside pocket of his vest, felt around, then touched the inside pocket of his jacket, even slightly turning his body to rummage through his trouser pocket, before raising his head again with an apologetic smile.

"I'm so sorry. I changed my coat when I left home, and I forgot my ID in another coat."

His tone was sincere, and his expression gentle, perfectly portraying the image of a forgetful scholar.

The librarian shook his head. "Sir, according to library rules, without a library card, I cannot lend you this book."

"I see," Klein said with a hint of disappointment. "Well then, I'm sorry to have bothered you."

He put his silk hat back on, tapped his cane lightly on the ground, and turned to walk toward the door.

The boots made a steady, rhythmic sound as they stepped on the wooden floor.

Please bookmark the only official website for this novel: ".". This is the only website the site owner uses; other websites may stop updating at any time.

As he reached the doorway, he paused, turned his head slightly, and said in a gentle, scholarly voice:

"By the way, on page seven of chapter three of that book, there's a note in the bottom right corner that says 'He is watching.' I heard that the handwriting isn't the original author's, and I don't know who wrote it. You can take a look if you have time."

After saying that, he pushed open the glass door and walked out, his figure disappearing around the street corner.

The administrator stared blankly at the closed door, then looked down at the notes on the table.

His fingers, as if possessed, turned to Chapter Three, page seven, in the bottom right corner—and sure enough, there was a line of small words written in dark red ink:

"He is watching."

The administrator shuddered, slammed the book shut, and pulled his hand back as if he had been burned.

He subconsciously locked the notebook back in the black iron cabinet, checked the latches twice to make sure they were secure, and then let out a long sigh.

What he didn't know was that on the way he carried that book from the deepest part of the library to the counter, during the whole process of opening the book, checking the version, and closing it, the contents of a certain page in the book had already been "read".

It is not by the eyes, nor by memory, but by a more fundamental and hidden way.

It looked like a gray shadow.

Outside the library

Klein walked down the street, tapping his cane on the cobblestones, a slight smile playing on his lips beneath his hat brim.

On the notebook in his pocket, there was a new line of text that he hadn't written before—it was what he had "seen" above the gray fog the moment the administrator took out the notebook.

He didn't even touch the book.

But the information from that book was already in his mind.

And now, as the curator, you've returned.

As is customary, you ask the librarian if anything has happened.

The librarian said "no" and didn't mention Mr. Moriarty—too many people borrow books from the library every day, and too many people forget their IDs; it was something that didn't need to be recorded.

You checked the borrowing slips and inventory again, and there were no errors or omissions.

The book is fine, the caretaker is normal, and there are no messy footprints at the entrance; everything is normal.

So, the librarian had no idea what had happened, and neither did you, the librarian. The library remained perfectly safe and secure.

However, the news had already been leaked to the Gray Fog.

……

"That's truly praiseworthy of the fool."

Shen Kang muttered to himself.

The announcement of Ghost/Circuit Breaker also ushered in a new era.

Before the Spectre/Circuitbreaker was announced in 2018, security research mainly focused on the software level and cryptographic algorithms, with hardware considered the "foundation of trust".

After the Ghost/Circuit Breaker was announced, people discovered a new world.

Heroes and valiant men emerge in endless succession.

Omen (fha)

Radiation, (fallut)

Fall (nfall)

Knight, (vltjcky).

Inception (ncptn)

Ghost Next Generation (pct-n)

Ghost race state, (htac)...

This situation is somewhat similar to the opening of One Piece—"Want my treasure? You can have it all! Go find it! I've left all my treasure there." This line sent people from all over the world to the seas, thus beginning the Great Pirate Era.

In the computer industry, this means:

Want to bypass the highest barrier between operating systems and virtual machines?

Do you want to bridge the absolute privilege gap between user mode and kernel mode?

I did not erase any physical traces left by predictive execution—even if the instructions have been discarded by the logic, the cache still remembers them, and the buffer still echoes.

The key to royal power you seek is hidden within the embers of these transient executions.

Go find it.

I placed the high-privilege gateway that crosses all security boundaries deep within the CPU's microarchitecture.

As a result, security researchers from all over the world flocked to this underlying hardware that was once considered "unlikely to have vulnerabilities".

From this point on, the "Great Exploration Era" of microarchitecture attacks officially began.

But that was in 2018.

And now, it is 2009.

This was still an era where "China Telecom 3 is too fast!"

Intel's most powerful processor is still the 7-965, which uses an extremely advanced 45-nanometer process, has 4 cores and 8 threads, a base frequency of up to 3.2 GHz, and an unlocked multiplier. It can be overclocked to a terrifying 5.5 GHz using liquid nitrogen, and it's only 7999 yuan!

In the sweltering summer, Shen Kang would buy He Qiuzhu a small pudding for five cents and watch her eat it with relish.

Nokia's classic ringtones echoed throughout the study room; when a phone vibrated, everyone in the classroom looked down.

In the dormitory, some people use "Kuaibo" to watch movies, and some use "eMule" to download Mei operas. The public telephones in the school are still working; you can make a call for three minutes by inserting a coin for 5 cents.

The experts in the security community are all playing with L-injection and Trojan evasion; they can brag for three days about getting a BHL. Nobody looks at the CPU, nobody looks at the cache, nobody realizes that hardware can lie.

The whole world was still immersed in a simple and naive technological order, like a ship without radar, drifting peacefully on the sea before the storm.

This was 2009.

There are 9 years until 2018.

For the nine years before the vulnerability was discovered, or perhaps eight years, Spectre/Meltdown was an unsolved "backdoor" that no one knew about, but which actually existed in all computers.

What does this mean?

This means that it is a key to unlocking this world.

Because this is the information age.

Wall Street's trading systems process millions of orders per second, each one going through a CPU; the Federal Reserve's clearing network, cross-border bank FT messages, and the stock market's matching engine all run on chips; before ATMs around the world dispense banknotes, their CPUs have already performed dozens of encryption calculations, balance verifications, and identity comparisons.

Fiber optic cables pierce the Pacific Ocean floor, routers forward data packets day and night, and each data packet undergoes countless processing steps from entering the network card to leaving the network cable—all done by the CPU; satellites in the sky calculate the calendar, receivers on the ground determine the position, and missile guidance systems correct their trajectories; CT scanners in hospitals reconstruct images, blood analyzers match indicators, and electronic medical record databases retrieve a person's entire medical history in milliseconds.

The power plant's C system monitors the boiler temperature, the railway dispatch center's computer automatically arranges routes, and the civil aviation passenger plane's flight management system constantly calculates fuel and speed at cruising altitude.

In this era, almost every moment a value is recorded, there is a chip quietly executing instructions behind the scenes.

It doesn't make a fuss, doesn't overstep its authority, and doesn't make mistakes.

It is regarded as the cornerstone of the entire information world, laid piece by piece at the very bottom of human civilization.

People trusted it as much as they trusted the foundations of a building to stay afloat, as much as they trusted the iron doors of a bank vault to remain unopened by the wind. Thus, all the secrets of the world were entrusted to it with complete confidence.

Important official trips, encrypted communications within the diplomatic system, core quotes from multinational corporations, military deployment data, private medical records from hospitals, PINs for every bank card, every email, and every late-night search record.

Data originates from the keyboard, enters memory, flows through the bus, and ultimately passes through the CPU.

The CPU is the only, unavoidable middleman.

It sees everything.

No one asked it what it had seen.

Now, a cool and aloof male god knows this and can ask it—"Hey kid, what did you see? Tell me."

If it were a CPU from ten or more years in the future, she would reluctantly reject the temptation of the aloof male god, look down at her shoes, and say, "I don't know, don't ask me."

But nowadays, a CPU is like a lonely little girl who has never had any friends. She blinks her big eyes and happily tells everyone she knows.

Because someone had already taught us about CPUs from over a decade later.

And the current CPU, no one has ever told her that those are secrets.

……

Upon realizing this, Shen Kang suddenly had a strange feeling.

An unprecedented feeling of "power".

Even though he was a reborn person, and even though he had been starting businesses and accumulating more and more wealth since his rebirth, Shen Kang had never felt this "powerful" before.

Because he never imagined that he could influence the government; he never imagined that he could access the level of embassies abroad; and he never imagined that he could participate in the great power games that would affect the world order.

He was just an ordinary person.

Even if he is reborn, he will still be an ordinary person.

If he can earn more money, help his fellow residents in the welfare home have a better future, and make more people's lives better because of him, then he has already achieved great success.

Those kinds of high-level matters are beyond the reach of an ordinary person like him.

Therefore, he is not "powerful".

But things are different now.

He seems to have an opportunity to influence FT's operations.

He seemed to have the opportunity to see classified information at the level of an overseas embassy.

He seems to have a chance.

It influences the global landscape.

……

Xiao Bonian noticed that Shen Kang, who was standing to the side, remained unusually quiet for a long time.

If a child is quiet, they're definitely up to no good.

Xiao Bonian didn't know why this sentence suddenly flashed into his mind.

Then he subconsciously turned his head and looked over, and saw Shen Kang sitting quietly in the chair, not acting strangely, but the expression on his face was very strange, stranger than ever before.

"What are you thinking about?"

Xiao Bonian asked subconsciously.

Shen Kang finally snapped out of his daze at those words, sluggishly twisting his neck with a somewhat vacant look in his eyes, as if he had just woken up from a long dream.

After blinking a couple of times, he regained his usual clarity.

Then, he suddenly smiled.

"I'm wondering whether it's more fun to say 'the global computing power has decreased by 10,000 times' or to build a 200-meter caliber sniper rifle."