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Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

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Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

#81

Post by ixtli »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #50
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very disingenuous of Intel tho This crisis has taken Intel, in my mind, from an American behemoth at the vanguard of technology to a sclerotic overgrown mess. Bugs happen, crises happen. When you're a $200 billion company, those mistakes scale deafeningly. The bugs are unfortunate, but not unreasonable. Intel's communication, however, from the first press release to crap like this, has been disingenuous to the poin…

As much as I hate to say it, I think the Intel PR machine is working stunningly. Every geek I speak to will tell you the world's on fire. Every non-geek I speak to responds with "oh, really? if it's such a big problem how come no-one has heard about it? Oh, ok, well there might have been that one headline..." I am infuriated by Intel's response no end, however I'm also somewhat impressed. They seem to have completely…

There's a 'too big to fail' thing going on here I think, because what you've said about Intel is exactly how I felt about Equifax's breach. At a certain point of terrible-ness people just shrug and carry on.

Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

#82

Post by rob-olmos »

maltalex wrote: post #10
nickysielicki wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wiki.debian.org/Microcode The real news here is that Intel thinks they can fix this via microcode. This is surprising because initially there were some strong arguments that this wouldn't be possible.

Yeah, well, let's not break out the champagne yet. According to your link: > The BIOS (or UEFI) updates the CPU microcode during boot, however most of the time either the motherboard vendor won't issue frequent BIOS/UEFI updates, or the user won't install such updates. For these reasons, the system processor is likely to be running with outdated microcode on a vast number of systems. We still need the various manufac…

Like others have said typically the microcode update is applied by both the BIOS and kernel. Typically the kernel has the latest microcode.

However, there could be an issue where updating the microcode at kernel time can cause an issue due to a microcode version (or lack of) from the BIOS.

Only other thing I could think of is the microcode update that disables TSX, I believe, could only disable it if TSX wasn't used yet.

So I suppose it's also possible that the microcode has to be updated by the BIOS because some boot process prevents the kernel from being effective with its microcode update step.

Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

#83

Post by wildmusings »

rdtsc wrote: post #65
shirian wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reference, I received this email before today: By now, we're sure most everyone have heard of the Meltdown and Spectre attacks. If not, head over to https://meltdownattack.com/ and get an overview. Additional technical details are available from Google Project Zero. https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privi... The FreeBSD Security Team was notified of the issue in late December and received a b…

> FreeBSD Security Team was notified of the issue in late December Anyone else thinks this was kind of a slap in the face to the smaller communities and companies or is it just me? They were notified in late December, right before the holidays, so that's basically only 2-3 weeks of work. Obviously nobody _had_ to notify anyone, could have just released it right away, so it was a professional courtesy, but why not ext…

The more people you tell, the higher the chance of a leak. "Loose lips sink ships."

Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

#84

Post by 8_hours_ago »

bcantrill wrote: post #27

This is only Spectre, not Meltdown. Meltdown requires KPTI, which depends on your OS. For OSs that did not enjoy months of advanced disclosure (which is: any OS that isn't Windows, MacOS or mainline Linux), that work is ongoing and will depend on the OS. (Speaking for SmartOS/illumos, that work is reasonably far along and making promising progress -- but we don't yet have a functional prototype.) As for Spectre, thes…

FYI, Ubuntu released updates today for Meltdown:

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS: https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3522-1/

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3522-2/

Ubuntu 17.10: https://usn.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-3523-1/

Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

#85

Post by cratermoon »

jayflux wrote: post #57
BuildTheRobots wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I hate to say it, I think the Intel PR machine is working stunningly. Every geek I speak to will tell you the world's on fire. Every non-geek I speak to responds with "oh, really? if it's such a big problem how come no-one has heard about it? Oh, ok, well there might have been that one headline..." I am infuriated by Intel's response no end, however I'm also somewhat impressed. They seem to have completely…

Is that really good PR? Or just news that hasn't hit the mainstream because they don't understand it or doesn't affect them much.

It's good PR. If a mainstream media outlet looks into it they are predisposed to "hear" two views and weigh them equally. They'll get one from the OS/Security community saying "this is really bad" and one from Intel (via their spokespeople) saying "don't worry about it, we got it". Then their journalistic tendency will be to give more weight to what Intel say over what a bunch of "nerds" say, and the resulting headline will be "Intel fixing chip bug some say is puts the cloud at risk" or some such nonsense.

Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

#87

Post by userbinator »

wott wrote: post #71
jokoon wrote: post #25

I wonder what will the next big security hole. I'm becoming very pessimistic about how I can trust computers. Computers can do amazing thing, but software seems fragile, unreliable and untrustworthy. I have been keeping notes on paper for years now, and it doesn't look like it's going to change.

It's been a while I don't bother much about security any more, because I consider everything insecure. So I just do not put all my eggs in the same basket, I do not store much personal information on my computer, I store even less online, I do not store any money/payment related information, and I just admit I will however sometimes get my butt kicked here or there. It is like my house. Anyone can break in at any tim…

It feels better to admit insecurity as a given, than to constantly fight for a false feeling of security I cannot achieve anyway.

...and more importantly, not make our lives significantly worse in pursuit of that "perfect security".

Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

#88

Post by onedognight »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #77
privong wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just buy an AMD chip right now. AMD chips are reportedly susceptible to Spectre, so that's not going to help. From https://meltdownattack.com : Almost every system is affected by Spectre: Desktops, Laptops, Cloud Servers, as well as Smartphones. More specifically, all modern processors capable of keeping many instructions in flight are potentially vulnerable. In particular, we have verified Spectre on Intel, AMD, a…

Meltdown, however, is the one that results in nontrivial performance degradation in order to patch. And Meltdown specifically only affects Intel processors.

Meltdown affects some ARM prcessors as well.

https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update

Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

#89

Post by userbinator »

sounds wrote: post #62
kyledrake wrote: post #49

This is how this terrible CEO tells us about microcode fixes, at a CES speech? Or is he even talking about a microcode update, or about the patches everybody else has been losing their lives working on? What a crap response to such a huge and existential issue. Make a web page on the Intel site with concise, real information on what's going on and what to do. We're a week into disclosure and there's still no patch fo…

Let me break down what the article really says (it's pretty short): > He also said that Intel expects to issue updates > to its processors soon. More than 90 percent will be > getting them within the week, and the rest by the end > of January. Intel expects 90 percent will "get an update." 90 percent of what? It should be self-evident that Intel means 90 percent in whichever way gives them the largest percentage. I e…

...or maybe the other 10% are in-order non-speculative designs which are intrinsically immune; they still have a few:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark (basically a die-shrink of a 486!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnell_(microarchitecture)

Re: Intel CEO: Patches will come to 90% of chips in the next week

#90

Post by mrpopo »

appleflaxen wrote: post #68
berkut wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For private servers that are totally not connected to the internet in any way and don't need to be, run self-developed code on data which is mainly CPU-bound but also need a lot of disk IO for reading files and memory mapping data, I'm pretty certain it'll make a noticeable difference, for no security benefit.

but isn't it pretty easy to avoid the security update on those machines?

In the short term, maybe. But the OS update processes are incremental. If the user wants to upgrade their OS version for some reason (new feature, etc), they will get the performance hit bundled together.
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