Am I reading correctly that this has been under embargo for over a year?
Nearly a year, at least, judging by when the CVE numbers were assigned.
MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
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Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#22In a Dutch article (https://nos.nl/artikel/2284630-nederlanders-vinden-beveiligi...), one of the researchers says "het aantal mensen bij bedrijven als Intel die zich op dit niveau met beveiliging bezighoudt, is echt op de vingers van twee handen te tellen." = There are 10 or fewer people working on security at this level at companies like Intel.
This sounds very hard to believe to me. With the previous attacks there surely are bigger teams working on this kind of stuff?
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#23Am I reading correctly that this has been under embargo for over a year?
It was discovered June last year according to this timeline, so a lot of people must've successfully kept mum for a long time: https://mdsattacks.com.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#24Hyper-Threading has been a source of security concerns for a decade now, and vulnerabilities in existing HT implementations have been trickling out over the last few years. Unlike Management Engine or TrustZone, at least we can disable Hyper-Threading (for a 30% performance hit).
30% performance hit? I'm sure that heavily depends on the workload... and I'm also sure you lose performance when HT is on, depending on the workload as well.
I've seen this claim made for routers and other low intensity low latency workloads.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#25For me as a home user, taking a performance hit of any kind in response to threats which haven't yet been seen in the wild simply isn't good math.
I'd really like to be given a choice, at least. My gaming PC is used exclusively for gaming, so it needs to be performant, but does not need to be secure.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#26Hyper-Threading has been a source of security concerns for a decade now, and vulnerabilities in existing HT implementations have been trickling out over the last few years. Unlike Management Engine or TrustZone, at least we can disable Hyper-Threading (for a 30% performance hit).
The security concern is remote code execution via JS, and sharing processor time with other people you don't trust, right? It should be up to the VM-as-a-service and browser vendors to flush the cache properly.
One CPU per process makes a lot more sense, especially now that we have so many specialized CPUs in our machines anyway.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#27Hyper-Threading has been a source of security concerns for a decade now, and vulnerabilities in existing HT implementations have been trickling out over the last few years. Unlike Management Engine or TrustZone, at least we can disable Hyper-Threading (for a 30% performance hit).
The security concern is remote code execution via JS, and sharing processor time with other people you don't trust, right? It should be up to the VM-as-a-service and browser vendors to flush the cache properly.
From a brief read, I think it reads in flight data not necessarily cached, so flushing cache won't help unfortunately.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#28There are 4 separate vulnerabilities in MDS, not just the one reported in the ZombieLoad paper. They each have CVEs. Chrome Browser response here: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/mds
> Linux users should apply kernel and CPU microcode updates as soon as they are available from their distribution vendor, and follow any guidance to adjust system settings.
Canonical says that they have those for 14/16/18.04 [1]. But possibly more interesting is the fact that this disclosure has been so well synchronized. How do the relevant players decide what the threshold is for informing other tech companies? How does everyone know what policies that the constituent companies use to prevent early disclosure or unintended disclosure to 'somewhat-less-trusted-employees'? Is this all coordinated by US CERT?
[1] https://blog.ubuntu.com/2019/05/14/ubuntu-updates-to-mitigat...
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#29Hyper-Threading has been a source of security concerns for a decade now, and vulnerabilities in existing HT implementations have been trickling out over the last few years. Unlike Management Engine or TrustZone, at least we can disable Hyper-Threading (for a 30% performance hit).
Disabling hyper-threading is highly unlikely to produce a 30% performance hit. Most highly optimized software disables or avoids hyper-threading because doing so increases performance.
Hyper-threading tends to benefit the performance of applications that have not been optimized, and therefore presumably are also not particularly performance sensitive in any case.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
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