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Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, could have prefaced his Open Source Summit Europe keynote speech, MDS, Fallout, Zombieland, and Linux, by paraphrasing Winston Churchill: I have nothing to offer but blood sweat and tears for dealing with Intel CPU's security problems.
Or as a Chinese developer told him recently about these problems: "This is a sad talk." The sadness is that the same Intel CPU speculative execution problems, which led to Meltdown and Spectre security issues, are alive and well and causing more trouble.
The problem with how Intel designed speculative execution is that, while anticipating the next action for the CPU to take does indeed speed things up, it also exposes data along the way. That's bad enough on your own server, but when it breaks down the barriers between virtual machines (VM)s in cloud computing environments, it's a security nightmare.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday October 30 2019, @06:54PM
So we are going to have to design software to run on cpu's designed primarily with the interest of mass international surveillance from totalitarian countries?
And all cpus from these countries have side channel attacks which break security of virtual machines in cloud architectures run by the same totalitarian countries?
And if there were a free country or free group making free processors which can be secured, all of the spies would switch to these and then infiltrate said country or group with the force of a tidal waves of money.
Gosh this dark forest sure is dark for a little old public interest technologist like myself.
Where is Tron when you need him.
thesesystemsarefailing.net