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CPU Security Mitigations

posted by chromas on Monday September 03 2018, @12:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the hackers-may-violate-your-ring dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Intel has backtracked on the license for its latest microcode update that mitigates security vulnerabilities in its processors – after the previous wording outlawed public benchmarking of the chips.

With the Linux 4.19 kernel that just kicked off development this month has been continued churn in the Spectre/Meltdown space, just not for x86_64 but also for POWER/s390/ARM where applicable. For getting an overall look at the performance impact of these mitigation techniques I tested three Intel Xeon systems and two AMD EPYC systems as well as a virtual machine on each side for seeing how the default Linux 4.19 kernel performance -- with relevant mitigations applied -- to that of an unmitigated kernel.

At the BlackHat conference last month, Christopher Domas demonstrated an attack against an x86 CPU using MSR's and an embedded RISC core to bypass ring protections. The full presentation "GOD MODE UNLOCKED - Hardware Backdoors in x86 CPUs" is viewable on YouTube. Is it time for CPU vendors to rethink security?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03 2018, @01:16AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 03 2018, @01:16AM (#729714)

    is spectre / meltdown only the start of these attacks?

    Well, Foreshadow is already #3, and there are multiple variations of Meltdown and Spectre.

  • (Score: 2) by black6host on Monday September 03 2018, @01:39AM

    by black6host (3827) on Monday September 03 2018, @01:39AM (#729718) Journal

    I believe that with the increased complexity of these processors comes more and more vulnerabilities. Basically CPUs and whatnot are nothing more than software modeled in hardware. And software of this complexity? Were it a standalone program what would your expectations be with regards to it being absolutely secure? For me, little to none.