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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 04 2018, @08:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the defect-closed-will-not-fix dept.

It seems Intel has had some second thoughts about Spectre 2 microcode fixes:

Intel has issued new a new "microcode revision guidance" that confesses it won't address the Meltdown and Spectre design flaws in all of its vulnerable processors – in some cases because it's too tricky to remove the Spectre v2 class of vulnerabilities.

The new guidance (pdf), issued April 2, adds a "stopped" status to Intel's "production status" category in its array of available Meltdown and Spectre security updates. "Stopped" indicates there will be no microcode patch to kill off Meltdown and Spectre.

The guidance explains that a chipset earns "stopped" status because, "after a comprehensive investigation of the microarchitectures and microcode capabilities for these products, Intel has determined to not release microcode updates for these products for one or more reasons."

Those reasons are given as:

  • Micro-architectural characteristics that preclude a practical implementation of features mitigating [Spectre] Variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715)
  • Limited Commercially Available System Software support
  • Based on customer inputs, most of these products are implemented as "closed systems" and therefore are expected to have a lower likelihood of exposure to these vulnerabilities.

Thus, if a chip family falls under one of those categories – such as Intel can't easily fix Spectre v2 in the design, or customers don't think the hardware will be exploited – it gets a "stopped" sticker. To leverage the vulnerabilities, malware needs to be running on a system, so if the computer is totally closed off from the outside world, administrators may feel it's not worth the hassle applying messy microcode, operating system, or application updates.

"Stopped" CPUs that won't therefore get a fix are in the Bloomfield, Bloomfield Xeon, Clarksfield, Gulftown, Harpertown Xeon C0 and E0, Jasper Forest, Penryn/QC, SoFIA 3GR, Wolfdale, Wolfdale Xeon, Yorkfield, and Yorkfield Xeon families. The list includes various Xeons, Core CPUs, Pentiums, Celerons, and Atoms – just about everything Intel makes.

Most [of] the CPUs listed above are oldies that went on sale between 2007 and 2011, so it is likely few remain in normal use.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @06:53PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 04 2018, @06:53PM (#662584)

    we've got to have open hardware. put these minions of the surveillance state out to pasture.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @12:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 05 2018, @12:38AM (#662709)

    While a noble idea in practice no one will care. Most people do not have a fab. Unlike open source code anyone with a computer can look and build it. CPUs not so much. Do you really think you can noodle out billions of traces and figure out what they do? You may be able to work out some bits here and there. Sorry, an interesting idea that does nothing.