Hundreds of gadget makers and software companies at this week’s annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas are staking the success of their newest products on the latest and greatest processors from Intel, AMD, ARM and others. But those bets are looking shaky, even by Sin City’s standards, after last week’s bombshell that many of those processors are plagued by serious security vulnerabilities known as Meltdown and Spectre.

Processors lend a degree of intelligence to just about any electronic device—including the thousands of automobiles, home appliances and gaming systems displayed at the exhibition. It is now clear that the insatiable need for faster processors has had a dark side, as chipmakers cut corners on security, exposing potentially billions of personal computers, mobile devices and other electronics to a new crop of digital attacks for years to come.

Every computer relies on a piece of software known as a kernel to, among other things, manage the interactions between end-user applications—spreadsheets, Web browsers, etcetera—and the underlying central processing unit and memory. The kernel starts and stops the other programs, enforces security settings and restricts access to a device’s memory and data resources. Not surprisingly, the kernel’s speed determines how fast the computer performs as a whole. Chipmakers protect the kernel by isolating it from other programs running on the computer, unless those programs are given specific permission—or “privilege”—to access the kernel.