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Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

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

#411

Post by jabl »

tedunangst wrote: post #289
cma wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add another point: NVDA is up 5% and doesn't have the same direct competitive narrative. If money has to be spent rectifying the issue with new or more CPUs due to performance loss, that's less money available for spending on Nvidia GPUs. It might tip a few marginal applications in favor of eating the development costs to migrate to GPGPU, but that effect isn't likely nearly as high, especially if applications wit…

Chipotle is also up 5%. All these engineers are going to need lots of burritos to eat.

You're saying that gas in the cleanroom caused the chips to behave incorrectly?

Excuse me while I go and invest in a company making rubber underwear.

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

#412

Post by rdl »

I wonder how Intel will deal with this.

If I were Intel, I'd offer free replacements for at-par performance, and potentially tiny cash payment for upgraded performance. Assuming the marginal cost to produce chips, especially older/slower ones, is very low, the only real cost to them is losing out on potential upgrade sales which would have happened organically, for a while.

However, doing this keeps Qualcomm/ARM and AMD from making massive inroads into the market. As well, it would be a great way for Intel to accelerate adoption of their newer technologies, causing even greater lock-in (you could assume a much higher percentage of users will have a feature)

This all works great for socketed CPUs (still common for servers/cloud). For embedded, where CPU is more likely non-replaceable even if socketed) CPU peak performance probably doesn't matter as much -- maybe do a discount coupon? Or work with equipment vendors to subsidize upgrades.

Laptops and non-technical end users (who couldn't swap their own CPU) probably don't care as much but also don't have the ability to upgrade. A rebate/upgrade program would work, or a substantial cash payment. Doing it as e.g. $50 cash or $250 toward your next Intel-CPU laptop would be interesting.

Intel is rich, the market leader, incumbent across multiple segments, etc., so they really should go overboard on their response.

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

#414

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #52

Can someone help me understand why this is such a big deal? This doesn’t seem to be a flaw in the sense of the Pentium FDIV bug where the processor returned incorrect data. It doesn’t even seem to be a bug at all, but a side channel attack that would be almost expected in a processor with speculative execution unless special measures were taken to prevent it. And it doesn’t seem like it can be used for privilege esca…

[deleted]

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

#415

Post by narrator »

mtanski wrote: post #231
3pt14159 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have a performance estimate? I can eat 20 or 30%, but I can't eat 90%.

This comment further down thread mentions it's 20% in Postgres. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16061926

If so, this definitely moves the needle on the EPYC vs Xenon price/performance ratio.

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

#416

Post by Pharaoh2 »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #258
lmm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can read kernel (and hypervisor) memory then it seems like a very small step from that to a local root vulnerability - e.g. forge some kind of security token by copying it. There's an embargoed Xen vulnerability that may be related to or combine with this one to mean that anyone running in a VM can break out and access other VMs on the same physical host. That would be a huge issue for cloud providers.

> If you can read kernel (and hypervisor) memory then it seems like a very small step from that to a local root vulnerability - e.g. forge some kind of security token by copying it. This seems very wrong. I'm not aware of any privilege isolation in Windows relying on the secrecy of any value. Security tokens have opaque handles for which "guessing" makes no sense. Are you aware of anything?

I can think of a few ways to get privilege escalation if you already have rce as unprivileged user:

1. Read the root ssh private key from the openssh deamons kernel pages maintaining the crypto context and ssh into the system

2. Read a sudo auth key generated for someone using sudo and then use that to run code as a root user

3. Read the users password's whenever a session manager asks the users to reauth

4. If running in AWS/GCP inside a container/vm meant to run untrusted code, read the cloud provider private keys and get control on account

5. RCE to ROP powered privilege escalation exploit seems reasonable...

6. Rowhammer a known kernel address (since you can now read kernel memory) to flip some bits to give you root

Also remember running JS is basically RCE if you can read outside the browser sandbox, ads just became much more dangerous...

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

#417

Post by redcalx »

devcpp wrote: post #304
rbanffy wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good thing CPU is fairly compressible. Unless you meter it very carefully, you'll see the performance hit and it'll not impact you that much. Very few of my physical boxes are over 70% CPU utilization on a daily average. It's, however, really bad if you sell CPU cycles for a living. You just lost between 5 and 30% of your capacity. If you have a large building, you just lost part of your parking lot to the Int…

Problem is, most companies that need a lot of power only care about one thing - peak performance. And they tune it carefully in order to not overspend while guaranteeing minimal downtime. This means that they'll have to pretty much scale their infrastructure up by exactly 30%. That's a LOT for these big clients. Honestly, I'd just make sure the server firewalls are super tight and not take in the future patches. At l…

> I'd just make sure the server firewalls are super tight and not take in the future patches. At least for now.

Good security is about layers. No one layer can be assumed to be watertight, but with enough layers you hopefully get to a good place.

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

#418

Post by blackflame7000 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #37
cesarb wrote: post #35

This article appears to be jumping the gun. It presents the defect as a fact, but aren't we still in the "rumor" phase (other than perhaps the few who have early access to embargoed details)?

Stocks tend to move a lot more on rumour than they do on fact.

Trading would be a lot easier if you could wait till the facts come out

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

#419

Post by pi-rat »

mulmen wrote: post #398
seccess wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this patch comment, AMD x86 chips are not affected: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2

Sure but who is using AMD chips in place of Intel server chips? If company A competes in the widget market against company B and they both built their server infrastructure on Intel then neither company gained an advantage due to a performance degradation in Intel hardware.

Azure got some AMD EPYC.

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

#420

Post by matt4077 »

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 spread conspiracy theories.

It's absolutely impossible for the most visible executive of one of the largest firms to engage in insider trading in such an obvious fashion and get away with it.

At this level, there is always a paper trail of who knew what when. There are internal and external audits if any suspicions arise.

Plus there are sever penalties, both civil (in the employment contract) as well as criminal. Intel's CEO is without a doubt in the 9- or 10-digit range of personal wealth. Risking time in jail to avoid a 10% loss on his stock holdings would be a terrible decision even if they considered the chance of being caught was low.

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