In the fall of 2016, two Israeli researchers doing work in cryptography and computer security — longtime pals Daniel Genkin and Yuval Yarom — met fellow cryptographer Mike Hamburg at a conference in Santa Barbara, Calif. During conversations about the work they were doing, they got the idea that the particular way computer chips were designed might be exploited by hackers. “It was just an idea floating around,” Genkin said. “None of us knew of the implications back in 2016.” It wasn’t until the following year’s cryptography conference — held this time in Taiwan — that things began to gel. Genkin, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Maryland, Yarom and Hamburg met Paul Kocher, a well-respected cryptographer. It was then that the enormity of the chip vulnerability hit them. “Oh, this is really bad,” Genkin said. “This is a big problem. This is an industry-wide problem.” In December 2017, Kocher notified Intel of their findings.…