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More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

mdsattacks.com

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Re: More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

#31

Post by segfaultbuserr »

wtallis wrote: post #13
nootropicat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Intel-Corp... >Company is dying and has no way to turn itself around. >Culture is a "go along to get along" / don't rock the boat. Most workers are very passive. Inclusive culture focused on internal "networking" rather than winning. A lot of make work going on, probably 25% extra headcount >Middle and upper management are in direct revolt against CEO and his plans. D…

> This place is what Hewlett-Packard was probably like in 2000 (with the printer monopoly), the collapse is coming, but without starting over there is no way to fix it. Interestingly, that printer monopoly seems to be doing fine today, given how I have to go to hp.com to get drivers for my Samsung printer.

Hewlett-Packard was an electronic engineering, semiconductor, and computing company from the beginning (the first product they sold was an audio distortion analyzer, it used a creative circuit to achieve high performance at minimum cost), they used to do serious and innovative R&D. There were the glorious days when Hewlett-Packard makes state-of-art test equipment and semiconductor devices, developed in-house enterprise computer systems like HP-UX system and PA-RISC CPUs, first-generation of scientific and programmable handheld calculators, etc., not just today's customer printers and laptops.

e.g. I recently found a datasheet of an IC in an amateur radio gear, it were really the glorious days. Those chips with an HP logo (or a Motorola logo) are really cool.

> The INA series of MMICs is fabricated using HP’s 25 GHz f_max, ISOSAT™-I silicon bipolar process which uses nitride self-alignment, submicrometer lithography, trench isolation, ion implantation, gold metallization and polyimide intermetal dielectric and scratch protection to achieve excellent performance, uniformity and reliability.

Around 2000s, the EE & semiconductor department became an independent company, Agillent, and later Keysight.

I think the last major innovation at HP was probably memristor that was supposed to be the next evolution of digital logic and storage, and HP claimed that it was developing a memristor computer system. Unfortunately, it failed to materialize.

Re: More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

#32

Post by paulddraper »

systemdtrigger wrote: post #20

One question- do these vulnerabilities , including spectre and meltdown only help in stealing information or can they also hijack your computer to do arbitrary things?

To exploit these vulnerabilities, you already need (unprivileged, sandboxed) RCE.

These vulnerabilities "only" steal information; however that information could of course be leveraged into privilege escalation or anything else.

Re: More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

#33

Post by soulofmischief »

aeiou1234 wrote: post #3

another 0-4% performance hit for skylake

I'm glad I started off not overclocking my 6700k with the intent of cranking up the clock over time in order to maintain the same performance with regard to software bloat and mitigations like these. I got lucky and can hit 5Ghz safely, with a base of 4Ghz.

Definitely jumping to AMD next time around though. My next upgrade was originally going to be dual Xeons but those Ryzen Pro 3000s are looking nice.

Re: More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

#34

Post by coldtea »

Jonnax wrote: post #6

So Intel failed to mitigate the vulnerability when it was first reported. Then they extended the embargo from May until November. And they still didn't fix it. What's going on with Intel? Like they're going all in with lying in benchmarks against AMD and straight up forgetting what has been reported as security issues.

>So Intel failed to mitigate the vulnerability when it was first reported. Then they extended the embargo from May until November. And they still didn't fix it.

The assumption being that they could in the time given, but are sitting on their hands?

Re: More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

#35

Post by coldtea »

ageofwant wrote: post #10

Running the below over my machines gives me back the 8-30% cycles I originally paid for, depending on load type. This will have to do until everything is swapped to AMD. Note you only need 'mitigations=off' in later kernels. - name: Disable CPU-sapping security mitigations become: yes lineinfile: path: /etc/default/grub line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="noresume noibrs noibpb nopti nospectre_v2 nospectre_v1 l1tf=off…

>No I don't give a fuck about the 'risk' this introduces

Well, let's hope you're not powned because of this and get dragged into giving some fucks, for a 5-10% of performance hit you wouldn't notice anyway...

Re: More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

#36

Post by wolf550e »

coldtea wrote: post #34
Jonnax wrote: post #6

So Intel failed to mitigate the vulnerability when it was first reported. Then they extended the embargo from May until November. And they still didn't fix it. What's going on with Intel? Like they're going all in with lying in benchmarks against AMD and straight up forgetting what has been reported as security issues.

> So Intel failed to mitigate the vulnerability when it was first reported. Then they extended the embargo from May until November. And they still didn't fix it. The assumption being that they could in the time given, but are sitting on their hands?

No. This timeline shows incompetence, not sitting on their hands: https://mdsattacks.com/#ng-full-story

Re: More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

#37

Post by dijit »

systemdtrigger wrote: post #19
m_eiman wrote: post #18

Is it possible to apply the mitigations on an per-application level in Windows? IMHO it'd be pretty useful to be able have them on by default, but disable them for specific applications where you care about maximum performance and know that you won't be running untrusted code.

Tagging on with a similar query. I am on Windows 10. If I were to run Firefox in sandboxie, would be the attacker have to deal with an extra layer of security or does it offer no help?

It will offer no help;

for context, imagine that the attacker has access to all memory on the system. It's not -exactly- like that for a bunch of reasons but realistically it's very similar.

Re: More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

#38

Post by HelloNurse »

alkonaut wrote: post #27
m_eiman wrote: post #18

Is it possible to apply the mitigations on an per-application level in Windows? IMHO it'd be pretty useful to be able have them on by default, but disable them for specific applications where you care about maximum performance and know that you won't be running untrusted code.

Surely if you emulate a processor without speculative execution with good fidelity (Such as a good NES emulator) then the program running ON that emulator can't deduce anything from speculative execution? Is the answer (for home users ) to just sandbox some processes under an emulator layer? I'd be happy to just sandbox some sensitive processes like my browser even if it took a huge performance hit, so long as some o…

Not very likely: the attacker is outside the emulated vulnerability-free sandbox, and the state of the emulator is exposed like the state of any other program.

Accessing the emulator's memory means accessing the emulated program's memory, it's just slightly obfuscated.

Re: More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

#39

Post by the_duke »

krageon wrote: post #12
Jonnax wrote: post #6

So Intel failed to mitigate the vulnerability when it was first reported. Then they extended the embargo from May until November. And they still didn't fix it. What's going on with Intel? Like they're going all in with lying in benchmarks against AMD and straight up forgetting what has been reported as security issues.

Intel has become big and rich and has stopped (or perhaps never was) being very responsible. Given their fairly entrenched position in the industry, it's doubtful this strategy will impact their profit all that much and therefore we can expect to see more of this behaviour in the future.

Thankfully AMD is making serious headway and will continue to take market share from Intel. It will take time but Intel should begin to feel the sting soon.

Re: More Intel speculative execution vulnerabilities

#40

Post by stock_toaster »

aeiou1234 wrote: post #3

another 0-4% performance hit for skylake

What are we down to now? 70%? 80%? of original performance with all the mitigations added up by now?

If a car was advertised as emitting 20% less pollution than it actually did, people would be pissed[1]!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

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