SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the I-predict-another-one-in-six-months-tops dept.
Recompiling is unlikely to be a catch-all solution for a recently unveiled Intel CPU vulnerability known as TLBleed, the details of which were leaked on Friday, the head of the OpenBSD project Theo de Raadt says.
The details of TLBleed, which gets its name from the fact that the flaw targets the translation lookaside buffer, a CPU cache, were leaked to the British tech site, The Register; the side-channel vulnerability can be theoretically exploited to extract encryption keys and private information from programs.
Former NSA hacker Jake Williams said on Twitter that a fix would probably need changes to the core operating system and were likely to involve "a ton of work to mitigate (mostly app recompile)".
But de Raadt was not so sanguine. "There are people saying you can change the kernel's process scheduler," he told iTWire on Monday. "(It's) not so easy."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26 2018, @08:28AM
If companies and governments need to recompile everything then they'll start demanding cross-compatible sources and licenses to modify while making sure any future projects will abandon stuff like C++ in favor of stuff like Java. At that point the x86 and Intel are FUBAR.