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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday January 07 2018, @11:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the everyone-out-of-the-pool dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Qualcomm has confirmed its processors have the same security vulnerabilities disclosed this week in Intel, Arm and AMD CPU cores this week.

The California tech giant picked the favored Friday US West Coast afternoon "news dump" slot to admit at least some of its billions of Arm-compatible Snapdragon system-on-chips and newly released Centriq server-grade processors are subject to the Meltdown and/or Spectre data-theft bugs.

[...] Qualcomm declined to comment further on precisely which of the three CVE-listed vulnerabilities its chips were subject to, or give any details on which of its CPU models may be vulnerable. The paper describing the Spectre data-snooping attacks mentions that Qualcomm's CPUs are affected, while the Meltdown paper doesn't conclude either way.

[...] Apple, which too bases its iOS A-series processors on Arm's instruction set, said earlier this week that its mobile CPUs were vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown – patches are available or incoming for iOS. The iGiant's Intel-based Macs also need the latest macOS, version 10.13.2 or greater, to kill off Meltdown attacks.

Google has decided to publicly disclose the well speculated on CPU based security flaw ahead of their original schedule as a response to the rapidly increasing amount of information that is becoming available. It's official: Google was able to construct a PoC that can read kernel memory at a speed around 2000 bytes per second from a user space application. An overview of the situation is available at the Project Zero blog. Despite the AMD Linux kernel patch that disables the existing known mitigation for their processors Google specifically names AMD CPUs as suffering from the flaw along with Intel and ARM.

Linus Torvalds: "Is Intel basically saying 'We are committed to selling you shit forever and ever, and never fixing anything'?"

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has had some harsh words for Intel in the course of a discussion about patches for two bugs that were found to affect most of the company's processors. [...] Torvalds was clearly unimpressed by Intel's bid to play down the crisis through its media statements, saying: "I think somebody inside of Intel needs to really take a long hard look at their CPUs, and actually admit that they have issues instead of writing PR blurbs that say that everything works as designed."

The Finn, who is known for never beating about the bush where technical issues are concerned, questioned what Intel was actually trying to say. "Or is Intel basically saying 'we are committed to selling you shit forever and ever, and never fixing anything'?" he asked. "Because if that's the case, maybe we should start looking towards the ARM64 people more."

Intel Says Updates Will Render Systems "Immune" to Meltdown and Spectre Exploits

What does "immunity" to the "Meltdown" bug mean, and at what cost does it come?

Intel says it has developed and is issuing updates for all types of Intel-based machines that will "render those systems immune from both exploits (referred to as 'Spectre' and 'Meltdown') reported by Google Project Zero. "Intel has already issued updates for the majority of processor products introduced within the past five years," says an Intel spokesperson. "By the end of next week, Intel expects to have issued updates for more than 90 percent of processor products introduced within the past five years."

Intel's reference to "immune" is an interesting twist in this saga. The New York Times reported yesterday that Spectre fixes will be a lot more complicated as they require a redesign of the processor and hardware changes, and that we could be living with the threat of a Spectre attack for years to come. Intel's wording appears to suggest that this isn't the case for its own processors and security fixes.

Intel is facing class action lawsuits over Meltdown:

Just days after The Register revealed a serious security hole in its CPU designs, Intel is the target of three different class-action lawsuits in America.

Complaints filed in US district courts in San Francisco, CA [PDF], Eugene, OR [PDF], and Indianapolis, IN [PDF] accuse the chip kingpin of, among other things, deceptive practices, breach of implied warranty, negligence, unfair competition, and unjust enrichment.

The RISC-V Foundation would like to remind you that RISC-V is not affected.

Previously: Major Hardware Bug Quietly Being Patched in the Open
Patch for Intel Speculative Execution Vulnerability Could Reduce Performance by 5 to 35% [Update: 2]
Don't Expect Intel Chip Recall After Spectre and Meltdown, CEO Says



Original Submission #1Original Submission #2Original Submission #3Original Submission #4Original Submission #5

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Apparition on Sunday January 07 2018, @11:58PM (1 child)

    by Apparition (6835) on Sunday January 07 2018, @11:58PM (#619334) Journal

    AMD is still a winner in this situation because Spectre has no huge slowdowns associated with it and can be fixed with a firmware update AFAIK

    According to Matt Dillon of Amiga and DragonFlyBSD fame, Spectre can only be fixed by completely new hardware [dragonflybsd.org]. Not to say that he's completely correct, but he knows much more about hardware than I do.

    Also, none of the mitigations recommended so far completely protect against
    Spectre. I would argue, in fact, that the mitigations only amount to a
    small roadbump for attackers and will probably be defeated now that the
    attack vector is known.

    Nothing short of new hardware (not yet produced) will really make a dent in
    Spectre. That could be 6 months to a year away, depending on how big a
    fire is lit under the CPU vendors.

    [...]

    In otherwords, all of our options are bad. Spectre will not be mitigated
    in any real sense on any existing CPU. Until new CPUs start appearing down
    the line, 6 months or later from now, we are kind of all screwed. All of
    these mitigation's will probably be worked around by attackers in fairly
    short order.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @11:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @11:02PM (#619760)

    Spectre still only affects out of order processors.

    Meaning that all the In-Order processors are unaffected by it.

    If you can stand the performance loss associated with in-order processors, then not only can you save a huge amount of real estate per core, but you also get chips with consistently reproducible behavior and well defined, even if buggy, logic.

    This might be an opportunity for some new upstart chip manufacturers to create an ecosystem based around openly documented in-order processors, with chipsets intercompatible between manufacturers as was the case through the clone years of the late 80s to the late 90s for PCs, or much of the 70s/early 80s for kit computers utilizing common busses. If this were to happen it would still cost us more than an equivalent AMD or Intel system, but given the tech advanced today, even something built on much older process technologies could be optimized for both reduced power usage compared to previous designs, as well as better performance per cycle. Avoiding the patent minefield would take some work, but if we crowdsourced that among techies and tech savvy legal nerds, we should be able to map out acceptable/unacceptable technology to a sufficient degree that we could have systems with plug and play support for RISC-V, J-Core, OpenSparc, OpenRisc, and other processors all running off the same motherboards, utilizing a management process similiar to the AMD/ARM/Intel management processors, only with the security key settable by the end user, possibly even using NVRAM of some form to make it effectively infinitely rewritable and simple to clear (which would lose a third party access to your encrypted data without a copy of the key) while allowing you to easily secure your hardware, clear it if the key becomes compromised or if you want to securely wipe it and offer it for a third party's use.

    Sounds like a win win if somebodies can pull it off.