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El Reg published an article about a security flaw introduced by Intel starting with its Pentium Pro line of processors--and left in place for fifteen years, fixing it only in 2011--and also comes with instructions on how to exploit it. So, if you have any pre-2011 processor running some important machine, perhaps you should be thinking of an upgrade after you finish reading the article.
From the article:
It allows smart hackers to run rootkit code at the very lowest level on the computer, out of reach of the operating system, its applications, and even the hypervisor. This means the rootkit can, among other things, silently monitor and record the user's every keypress, mouse click, and download.
Efforts to detect the rootkit and eradicate it from a computer can be blocked, or hampered, by the malware itself. A nightmare, in other words.
The good news is that Intel spotted the howler in its processor blueprints, and corrected the issue: chips built from January 2011 and onwards (Sandy Bridge Core CPUs and later) are not affected. Also, operating systems can mitigate against the security hole at the hypervisor level, thus protecting themselves from miscreants exploiting the design flaw...
This kind of thing makes me want to go back to using a pocket calculator.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Wednesday August 12 2015, @10:06AM
FPGA's are not just a little slower or a little more power hungry than hard logic. It would be like running the entirety of the OS in python
To give some idea of how efficient they are: my day job involves a research CPU. In the FPGA on my desk, which consumes around 30W, we can fit 2-4 cores, depending on the exact configuration. Each one is a single-issue in-order MIPS III-compatible (roughly R4000-equivalent) running at 100MHz. That's roughly the same ballpark power usage as the quad-core 2.6GHz (out-of-order, superscalar, with SIMD plus integrated GPU) i7 in my laptop. Depending on the benchmark, Python 3 is 3-100 times slower than C, so you're about right: in terms of cycles per second, the i7 is 26 times faster than the FPGA. The softcore barely manages one instruction per clock, however, and the i7 can easily do 3-4, so in terms of instructions per second it's a good 100 times faster. Add to that, the softcore (at that size) doesn't have an FPU or vector unit (if we add them, the number we can fit on one FPGA goes down a lot), and has a less efficient instruction set (old MIPS vs modern x86, you get a lot more work done per instruction with x86) so in terms of work done it's easily 200 times slower.
In spite of that, it's actually quite useable for a lot of things. X is pretty slow, but we have a simple web browser that's just about useable. Vim takes ages to start because of the slow I/O, but is responsive once it's launched. It's basically like using a 20-year-old computer. Not something that I'd choose to do on a regular basis, but acceptable when I need to.
sudo mod me up