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

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: 2) by darkfeline on Monday September 03 2018, @10:19PM (1 child)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Monday September 03 2018, @10:19PM (#729985) Homepage

    If you don't trust the processor, then worrying about malicious code taking advantage of processor design flaws is a non-issue. Fix the first issue before worrying about the second, i.e. make sure you can trust your processor before worrying whether it has unintended security issues.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:46AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:46AM (#730678) Homepage
    I don't know if we're in violent disagreement or not, but it comes over as if you've not WTFV. "make sure you can trust your processor before worrying whether it has unintended security issues" is also kinda meaningless - you can't trust your processor until you've verified it has no security issues, like an additional core that can execute code that violates the main processor's protection mechanisms.
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