Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753/5715) were disclosed in January 2018 and forced AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, every major browser vendor, and every major OS vendor to ship emergency patches with real, measurable performance costs, KPTI alone cost some workloads 5-30%. This task's constant-time coding guidelines are exactly what cryptography libraries like OpenSSL and BoringSSL apply in practice to avoid leaking secrets through this same cache-timing channel.