Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes

Roritharr wrote: post #2

Does that mean hyperthreading is effectively unpatchably insecure? Cloud Providers are gonna have a bad time if this is true.

Question: If I rent 4 core AWS instance, does it mean 4 physical cores or 4 hyper threaded cores? Is there a standard to this definition of “cores” across GCP, DO, Linode, etc. I don’t have the experience or knowledge about cloud computing but just have a DO instance running a web server. I’m curious.

Re: Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes

#5

Post by ianai » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

Makes sense from the adage that more complexity means more exploits.

Re: Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes

#6

Post by Roritharr » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

Roritharr wrote: post #2

Does that mean hyperthreading is effectively unpatchably insecure? Cloud Providers are gonna have a bad time if this is true.

Thinking about this, they're probably gonna introduce "insecure but cheap" instances for customers that don't mind the chance of data leaks and takeovers...

Re: Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes

#7

Post by Aardwolf » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 7:29 PM UTC

Roritharr wrote: post #2

Does that mean hyperthreading is effectively unpatchably insecure? Cloud Providers are gonna have a bad time if this is true.

Is it a feasible solution to enable hyperthreading only for threads or forks of the same process? Then they can use this ability, but other processes cannot do timing attacks on this process in this core... I think

Re: Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes

#8

Post by Roritharr » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

fermienrico wrote: post #4

Roritharr wrote: post #2

Does that mean hyperthreading is effectively unpatchably insecure? Cloud Providers are gonna have a bad time if this is true.

Question: If I rent 4 core AWS instance, does it mean 4 physical cores or 4 hyper threaded cores? Is there a standard to this definition of “cores” across GCP, DO, Linode, etc. I don’t have the experience or knowledge about cloud computing but just have a DO instance running a web server. I’m curious.

I asked this a while ago: a cloud core is always just a hyperthread.

Re: Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes

#9

Post by Roritharr » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

Aardwolf wrote: post #7

Roritharr wrote: post #2

Does that mean hyperthreading is effectively unpatchably insecure? Cloud Providers are gonna have a bad time if this is true.

Is it a feasible solution to enable hyperthreading only for threads or forks of the same process? Then they can use this ability, but other processes cannot do timing attacks on this process in this core... I think

I'm guessing someone at Amazon is looking at this right now.

Re: Disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes

#10

Post by pvarangot » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

Roritharr wrote: post #6

Roritharr wrote: post #2

Does that mean hyperthreading is effectively unpatchably insecure? Cloud Providers are gonna have a bad time if this is true.

Thinking about this, they're probably gonna introduce "insecure but cheap" instances for customers that don't mind the chance of data leaks and takeovers...

Which is going to be everyone except customers who already have issues with cloud and need special instances because of regulations. Then we'll wee the occasional "30.000 credit cards stolen" hack every three years because of this issue and that'll be it.

It's another situation like what happened with WEP WiFi encryption ten years ago.