Engineers write off GC abuse because Spectre broke everything anyway Share Copy In early November, a developer contributing to Google's open-source Chromium project reported a problem with Oilpan, the garbage collector for the browser's Blink rendering engine: it can be used to break a memory defense known as address space layout randomization (ASLR). About two weeks later, Google software security engineer Chris Palmer marked the bug "WontFix" because Google has resigned itself to the fact that ASLR can't be saved – Spectre and Spectre-like processor-level flaws can defeat it anyway, whether or not Oilpan can be exploited. Or as Palmer put it, "we already have to plan for a world in which ASLR is bypassable."