L1 Terminal Fault - The Latest Speculative Execution Side Channel Attack

[cybertraveler]

You have to wonder how long the various spy agencies have known about these flaws.

Or whether they are responsible for them in the first place.

[audir8]

Or whether they are responsible for them in the first place.

We know that for Intel ME. No reason to assign nefarious behaviour when it's incompetence in the case of speculative execution vulnerabilities.

[cybertraveler]

...

when it's incompetence in the case of speculative execution vulnerabilities.

Where did you find out that? Or is it just your belief?

[torsionbar28]

Where did you find out that? Or is it just your belief?

Um, because intent requires evidence? Or is it just your belief? Every bug is not a conspiracy.

[audir8]

I also don't think Intel meant to design something like SGX and then self-disclose these vulnerabilities that affect SGX. We didn't see meltdown/L1T/spectre come up in the Snowden or other NSA/CIA hacks, so that makes me believe this was just losey-gosey CPU design. Which didn't happen at AMD and others.

[WesternSemiconductor]

No reason to assign nefarious behaviour

Of course there's a reason, and a very good one: plausible deniability.

Only a moron would plant backdoors that can be traced back to them. The intelligence agencies are, unfortunately, not run by morons.

We didn't see meltdown/L1T/spectre come up in the Snowden or other NSA/CIA hacks

More likely because it was classified SCI, not TS. Hardware vulnerabilities take almost a decade to pervade the majority of the gear out there; if they're discovered that's a decade of work lost. It's the kind of exploit that can be used even if only ten people know about it. Sprawling behemoths like PRISM need a massive workforce to keep them going, so they really can't be kept secret from the majority of NSA's own workforce.

[zboszor]

There's the old saying: If masons worked like programmers, the first woodpecker could ruin the whole civilization. It's official, Intel CPU architects are worse.

[oiaohm]

Well, it seems Moore's law is now inverted. Every other month we loose some computing power in an attempt to mitigate the new discovered flaws. I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of 2018, CPU's will be at least 50% slower...lol

This is causing those processing big data to be looking at risc-v and other things. Including strange ideas like having a cpu core having a thread management core. So you have a in-order core with upto 1024 threads cpu managed. So ever time it has to wait it changes to the next thread.

In order means you don't have speculative execution issues. Yes we are use to hyperthreading being 2 thread per core. 1024 per core is a completely different beast.

All these speculative execution issues could see the x86 loss the super computer and big server markets.

[brrrrttttt]

Where did you find out that? Or is it just your belief?

Hanlon's razor.

[wdb974]

Um, because intent requires evidence? Or is it just your belief? Every bug is not a conspiracy.

Also, as per Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."