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posted by martyb on Wednesday January 17 2018, @07:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the oughta-be-a-law dept.

Vox Media website theverge.com reports that Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) wants answers about the recent computer chip chaos.

Congress is starting to ask hard questions about the fallout from the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Today, Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) sent a letter [(pdf)] requesting a briefing from Intel, AMD, and ARM about the vulnerabilities’ impact on consumers.

[...] The two vulnerabilities are “glaring warning signs that we must take cybersecurity more seriously,” McNerney argues in the letter. “Should the vulnerabilities be exploited, the effects on consumers’ privacy and our nation’s economy and security would be absolutely devastating.”

Privately disclosed to chipmakers in June of 2016, the Meltdown and Spectre bugs became public after a haphazard series of leaks earlier this month. In the aftermath, there have been significant patching problems, including an AMD patch that briefly prevented Windows computers from booting up. Intel in particular has come under fire for inconsistent statements about the impact of the bugs, and currently faces a string of proposed class-action lawsuits relating to the bugs.

Meltdown can be fixed through a relatively straightforward operating-system level patch, but Spectre has proven more difficult, and there have been significant patching problems in the aftermath. The most promising news has been Google’s Retpoline approach, which the company says can protect against the trickiest Spectre variant with little negative performance impact.

The letter calls on the CEOs of Intel, AMD, and ARM to answer (among other things) when they learned about these problems and what they are doing about it.


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:16PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:16PM (#623854) Journal

    Yes. That is why it would be good to have a number of C compilers written in other languages. Especially a few written in interpreted languages. Python. JavaScript. Lisp. Etc. (Even if JIT'ed) These C compilers aren't meant to be fast or to generate great code. They are merely intended to work and provide a diversity of C compilers that also happen to run on many hardware platforms. I'm sure you can find a way to compile your target compiler using multiple of these compilers on multiple platforms. Then take those resulting binaries and re-compile your target compiler with each of those binaries which should generate identical optimized binaries of your target compiler.

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    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:46PM (#624286)
    This was the subject of a Ph.D. Thesis, called Double Diverse Compiling. You can read about it at https://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/ [dwheeler.com]