Again, Intel CPUs only.
Foreshadow/L1TF is the only prior problem of this nature that is unique to Intel. Meltdown bugs were also found in ARM and IBM POWER and mainframe designs, and Specture hits all of those and AMD as well.
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
#92There 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
Wow, ChromeOS decided to disable hyperthreading entirely? That seems like a pretty drastic mitigation. I wonder if that's just a short term solution or if they're planning to leave it that way indefinitely.
OpenBSD preemptively did the same thing [0] in 6.4, released nearly a year ago.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If running Linux you can disable the meltdown/spectre mitigations with the nopti option [1]. 1. https://yux.im/posts/technology/security/disable-meltdown-an...
'nopti' only disables the Meltdown mitigation. To disable all the mitigations (including Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF, and now MDS) you can use mitigations=off on newer kernels.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything that can't be fixed with a ten minute phone call to my bank is already public knowledge thanks to Experian, so I really don't have anything left to fear.
You have no conversations that'd you prefer not be sold on the darknet? With friends, family, therapists, doctors, lawyers, consultants? No pictures of your kids that they might not want spilled into a searchable database and used for machine learning to sell them things later in life? No private or symmetric keys which might be used to impersonate you or eavesdrop on you later? No in-progress documents which you are…
If someone wants to leverage speculative-execution vulnerabilities to get that sort of information off of my PC, it's not a problem that can be solved by yet another security patch. Don't reduce my PC's performance for the sake of somebody else's security concern.
At the end of the day the only secure computer is one that's turned off and locked up in a supply closet.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
Maybe we should start to seriously question the value of so long embargos. This is coordinated disclosure; if the vendor refuses reasonable coordination (and it seems Intel does, with such delays, and also because it stills silos the security researchers way too much), then fuck them and publish (probably not immediately but certainly not after a year...) It seems that broadly the same principles have been found inde…
I'm not really sure what the question is supposed to be. You could discover an Intel vulnerability and give them a 90 day timeline, or, for that matter, do what the Metasploit founders would have done and just immediately code up an exploit and publish it with no warning. All of these are viable options and all have precedent; it's up to the people discovering the flaws to make their own decisions.
It's particularly weird in this case to suggest that the embargo didn't help anyone, since (1) nobody appears to have leaked these flaws and (2) the cloud providers all seem to have fixes queued up.
Intel claims to have discovered some of these flaws internally, and this is a bug class we've known about (for realsies) for a little bit over a year now, in a class of products for which development cycles are themselves denominated in multiple years, so I'd cut them a bit of slack.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#96Hyper-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).
Decade and a half, even. If I remember right, the first CVE for an HT security flaw was summer 2005.
I announced it publicly 14 years ago yesterday.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#97In 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 ther…
There are probably fewer than 1000 people in the world capable of finding these kinds of vulnerabilities. Sounds about right to have 10 at Intel.
Out of curiosity, where would the others be?
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#98Hyper-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).
Also, HT is not such a great performance win - on a few different 4-core/8-thread machines, I had access to, loading all 8 threads to "100% CPU" (whatever that means) usually only delivers 20-30% faster computation than with HT off (4-core/4-thread) - which is inline with your 30% number. And that's an improvement - some 15 years ago, with similar computational loads, most of my tests ran 10-20% faster with the HT of…
> loading all 8 threads to "100% CPU" (whatever that means)
What application?
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#99For 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.
Didn't they already have a proof of concept Spectre or Meltdown exploit via a web page? Malicious ads seem like the best way to spread ransomware, etc.
No. There has been nothing shown that would exploit in real-world conditions. All Spectre exploits have required assistance from the target.
Re: MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs
#100It is funny how ChromeOS is the most ridiculously secure of the commonly available operating systems. It is not as if you can do much other than surf the internet with it. It makes me chuckle to think that my not-so-computer-literate friend whom I gave a Chromebook to is protected from anyone snooping in on Youtube, Hotmail and Youtube running on this toy machine (designed for 9 year olds). There really is nothing to…
Spectre/Meltdown are sacred cows in HN. Any comment that tries to bring a realistic view of them is immediately voted into the floor.