Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#201

Post by pmoriarty » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

cjbprime wrote: post #28

dzink wrote: post #20

Didn’t the Intel CEO just sell half of his shares/options? If he knew about these issues isn’t that illegal?

Yes, it would be, but in practice it's hard to nail people on this. He can argue that he'd already scheduled the sell when he learned about this and it will be difficult to prove otherwise.

"it will be difficult to prove otherwise"

The SEC could look at internal emails he got about this flaw, and if he got them (and especially if he replied to them) then it's pretty clear he knew about it.

They doubtlessly have other investigative tools they can use for this as well.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#202

Post by coolspot » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #154

rdtsc wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The privilege escalation is being fixed in software. The problem is that mitigation involves patching the kernel and that patch results in around 30% slowdown for some applications like databases or anything that does a lot of IO (disk and network). That's the big deal. Imagine you are running at close to full capacity after security fix reboot your service might tip over. It could mean a direct impact to cost and so…

Oh good, I put my SaaS (running mostly on Linode) up yesterday, then this happens. Can't wait for Linode to apply this patch to their infrastructure :( I'm cursed when it comes to timing. It's like when I bought that house in 2007, held onto it waiting for the market to recover, then tried to sell it only to find out my tenants had been using it to operate a rabbit-breeding business for years and completely trashed t…

You might try luck to sell this as comedy/drama movie script. :)

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#203

Post by johnjones4 » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

So is this sort of issue more likely to occur on a non-RISC chip because of added complexity? I know extremely little about microprocessor design beyond the 101 knowledge from college so forgive my ignorance.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#204

Post by joncrane » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

prewett wrote: post #152

jamisteven wrote: post #120

Literally just read here yesterday how the CEO dumped majority of his shares. So Shiesty. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16055851

Don't be so quick to blame. You might have read it yesterday, but he reported it on Nov 29, which means that the transaction happened either within two days prior or about a month, depending on if you believe the SEC's website or NASDAQ's website. But the question isn't when he sold his shares, the question is when did he put in the order to sell those shares. Those guys put their buy/sell orders in months in advance…

Evidence shows this bug was known in November. It only blew up this week.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#205

Post by svet_0 » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #123

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #79

I'm worried about the performance impact on low end intel chips like Atom/Celeron found in Chromebooks.30% hit will make computing on those platforms miserable. Talking about chromeOS, is there any speculation about the impact of bug? Does it's hardened sand-boxing techniques put it in a better position even if KASLR is compromised?

The bug isn't really KASLR, it's more about reading kernel memory from userspace through side channel attacks of speculative execution. KASLR is/was the cover for the kernel patches, to avoid disclosing the real bug.

Indeed, kernel memory read seems more likely than address only read, the memory probably needs to be cached (in L1 maybe?). Attack is a timing attack as can be seen in this very interesting tweet - https://twitter.com/brainsmoke/status/948561799875502080

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#206

Post by KindOne » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #98

dzink wrote: post #20

Didn’t the Intel CEO just sell half of his shares/options? If he knew about these issues isn’t that illegal?

You can be sure there's a young hotshot with sparkling eyes at SEC who is already typing a letter to Mr. Krzanich politely asking about the circumstances of that sell. At the same time, noone is doing eight figures transactions which require reporting to the SEC without talking to a lawyer. Right? Right? They really dislike insider trading, it's one of the few things where even rich people can get imprisoned -- and t…

Some people think it was due to the tax code changes.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#207

Post by aarongolliver » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

sooheon wrote: post #48

mindcrime wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems debatable. From what I recall, at least some news about this issue was already public before he sold his shares. And what would be illegal would be trading based on information that isn't public. OTOH, since details are still dribbling out, you could possibly argue that the Intel CEO had more complete information than the public. The sell could also have been scheduled in advance, which would - AFAIK - not viol…

Unless the advance scheduling is completely binding, I don't see why that should sidestep insider trading. What's to stop these guys from always having a cascading series of sells and buys 6 mo. in advance, and just cancelling them?

A good rule of thumb is that if you think you've discovered a loophole that would allow insider trading, and it only took you a few moments of thinking, the SEC thought of it already.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#208

Post by Retric » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

Sean1708 wrote: post #188

olfactory wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all companies paying for computing resources will have to pay roughly 30% more overnight on cloud expenses Well, if I rent a VPS with x performance, I still expect x performance after this flaw is patched. The company providing the virtual machine will perhaps have to pay 30% more to provide me with the same product I've been getting. Since most VPS offerings arbitrage shared resources, this will not increase costs…

> Well, if I rent a VPS with x performance, I still expect x performance after this flaw is patched. Are there any providers that state you will get x performance? Most that I've seen say you will m processors, n memory, and p storage but don't make any guarantees about how well those things will perform.

Last I checked Amazon AWS has a virtual processor metric not actual hardware metric. This is most noticeable in their lowest power instances which don't get a full modern CPU core.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#209

Post by hvindin » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #5

AMD must be pretty happy about this patch: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2

As long as the patch is all anyone notices then it looks great from AMD marketing. But I'm fairly confident (and a quick browse through the patched in the latest RC confirms at least one instance of this) where comments call out that AMD CPUs do things that should be considered bugs, so there's probably not going to be a lot of PR people telling the masses to read the source code. It's not exactly flattering to anyone.

One thing I can definitely respect about the kernel developers is that they don't seem to make any effort to be nice about the fact that they need to deal with undocumented nonsense from vendors all round.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#210

Post by _0w8t » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

spdy wrote: post #77

zouhair wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is typically what happens when you go for a long time without real competition. You get way too comfortable and bad habits start to pile up.

Isn't why this problem even exits the exact opposite? Intel was losing on the mobile market and changed internal testing to iterate faster by cutting corners. Found a quote: "We need to move faster. Validation at Intel is taking much longer than it does for our competition. We need to do whatever we can to reduce those times… we can’t live forever in the shadow of the early 90’s FDIV bug, we need to move on. Our comp…

This implies that ARM vendors do less validation. I guess ARM is just so much simpler that good enough validation can be done faster. So essentially this is payback time for Intel for keeping compatibility with older code and simpler to program architecture (stricter cache coherence etc.). It is like one can only have 2 of cheap, reliable, easy-to-program.