Intel CPUs Hit by NetCAT Security Vulnerability, AMD Not Impacted

gorobei

Diamond Member
Jan 7, 2007
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moore'slawisdead did a short bit on this last night. in his podcast with an actual server admin they talked about the performance hit of the security vulnerabilities being the thing that would drive earlier adoption of epyc. netcat drove one of his sources to upgrade to epyc this year rather than waiting.
 

Ajay

Lifer
Jan 8, 2001
15,332
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Well, Windows server admins were always looking for better sideband monitoring and admin functionality - and Intel delivered. All the while *NIX security people were making plenty of noise about the real and potential threats these features opened up. The chickens have come home to roost.

I wonder how much of AMD's success was due to luck and how much was due to proactive design.
 

nicalandia

Diamond Member
Jan 10, 2019
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I wonder how much of AMD's success was due to luck and how much was due to proactive design.
There is neither luck in the part of AMD design and incompetence in the Intel design team, one chose to be more secure, the other chose to cut corners to gain more performance, but as you eloquently put it. The chickens are coming home to roost.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
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There is neither luck in the part of AMD design and incompetence in the Intel design team, one chose to be more secure, the other chose to cut corners to gain more performance, but as you eloquently put it. The chickens are coming home to roost.

are you being serious?
no that not it.

Its because more people business, servers, happen to use intel processors, that more people have access to them in hacking them to find exploits.
Its that simple.

Remember the days when apple said they would pay someone 1 million dollars to hack a apple?
Again no one did it because the OS apple used was considered a minority and not worth hacking.
Now flash forward a couple of years and increase apple's success exponentially, do you still think Apples are unhackable as they proclaim they are or even will offer that 1 million dollar reward?

Please dont pass FUD.
AMD's RnD team had less then 1/10 of the funding intel had.
Intel's biggest mistake like anyone in tech was they thought they were smarter then the younger generation and didn't think completely out of the box, and not because they were cutting corners.

The reason why AMD's are bullet proof is not because they are better designed, but because there is just not enough of them in working circulation for exploits to be tripped.

Give AMD some time, let them saturate the market like Apple if they ever can, and lets see if they are still as bulletproof as you state there are.
 
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VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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Its because more people business, servers, happen to use intel processors, that more people have access to them in hacking them to find exploits.
Its that simple.
These aren't quite like that, like software exploits, these are due to INTENTIONAL CORNER-CUTTING, during their older design work. They played fast-n-loose with the implementation of their ISAs, and it turned around and bit them in the azz. They wanted performance, not security.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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The reason why AMD's are bullet proof is not because they are better designed, but because there is just not enough of them in working circulation for exploits to be tripped.

Give AMD some time, let them saturate the market like Apple if they ever can, and lets see if they are still as bulletproof as you state there are.
Cough. **. Cough.
 
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aigomorla

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these are due to INTENTIONAL CORNER-CUTTING, during their older design work

id like to see an actual tech paper written about this or some form of real credible proof.

Its a number game larry, you have 10,000 people using the same product, your bound to find issues with it faster then a product which has 1000 users.
And in the IT world, Intel has that much more market share still to date.

This is why exploits are being found for intel processors, because it pays that much better to find exploits for them.

Soon i predict were going to start finding exploits for ARM, as we are starting to get there with that many ARM Devices handling and controlling sensitive information.
 
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Thunder 57

Platinum Member
Aug 19, 2007
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id like to see an actual tech paper written about this or some form of real credible proof.

Its a number game larry, you have 10,000 people using the same product, your bound to find issues with it faster then a product which has 1000 users.
And in the IT world, Intel has that much more market share still to date.

This is why exploits are being found for intel processors, because it pays that much better to find exploits for them.

Soon i predict were going to start finding exploits for ARM, as we are starting to get there with that many ARM Devices handling and controlling sensitive information.

That sounds like nonsense though, as both Intel and AMD use x86-64. If an exploit is found on an Intel CPU but it does not affect an AMD CPU, wouldn't you agree that Intel made a mistake somewhere, or perhaps cut corners even?
 

Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
25,478
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are you being serious?
no that not it.

Its because more people business, servers, happen to use intel processors, that more people have access to them in hacking them to find exploits.
Its that simple.

Remember the days when apple said they would pay someone 1 million dollars to hack a apple?
Again no one did it because the OS apple used was considered a minority and not worth hacking.
Now flash forward a couple of years and increase apple's success exponentially, do you still think Apples are unhackable as they proclaim they are or even will offer that 1 million dollar reward?

Please dont pass FUD.
AMD's RnD team had less then 1/10 of the funding intel had.
Intel's biggest mistake like anyone in tech was they thought they were smarter then the younger generation and didn't think completely out of the box, and not because they were cutting corners.

The reason why AMD's are bullet proof is not because they are better designed, but because there is just not enough of them in working circulation for exploits to be tripped.

Give AMD some time, let them saturate the market like Apple if they ever can, and lets see if they are still as bulletproof as you state there are.
I disagree. No matter how many chips are used, Intel did not enforce any secuirity in its HT implementation, and AMD did. That has nothing to with numbers or who looked for what, Intel has the flaws, AMD does not (in many cases). As to why those decisions were made ? its all guessing. I do think Intel went for performance. Not sure the exact technical flow, but something like this,
Intel:
request made for data, and process retrieves it into cache. When ready to give information back, security check made, OOPS not privileged, so no data given, but by then the cat is out of the bag.

AMD checks before putting into cache..

Thats a design flaw that Intel made and AMD did NOT
 

ondma

Platinum Member
Mar 18, 2018
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id like to see an actual tech paper written about this or some form of real credible proof.

Its a number game larry, you have 10,000 people using the same product, your bound to find issues with it faster then a product which has 1000 users.
And in the IT world, Intel has that much more market share still to date.

This is why exploits are being found for intel processors, because it pays that much better to find exploits for them.

Soon i predict were going to start finding exploits for ARM, as we are starting to get there with that many ARM Devices handling and controlling sensitive information.
Yea, time will tell. Lets see if the AMD fans are so smug in a couple of years.
 

bononos

Diamond Member
Aug 21, 2011
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id like to see an actual tech paper written about this or some form of real credible proof.

Its a number game larry, you have 10,000 people using the same product, your bound to find issues with it faster then a product which has 1000 users.
And in the IT world, Intel has that much more market share still to date.

This is why exploits are being found for intel processors, because it pays that much better to find exploits for them.

Soon i predict were going to start finding exploits for ARM, as we are starting to get there with that many ARM Devices handling and controlling sensitive information.

Remember the Meldown/Spectre side channel expoits last year which was caused by Intel's aggressive branch optimization? Its like a never ending issue with new exploits like swapgs and who knows what in the near future. Do you think market share is purely the issue here.

Or Intel had so much more resources that they went into dangerous territory in the r&d which caused so many more issues than AMD?



 

Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
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Yea, time will tell. Lets see if the AMD fans are so smug in a couple of years.
AMD fans ? smug ? its very simple, Intel made some bad design choices, and AMD did not. See my post #12. As I said there, thats roughly the problem, when the security checks are made.. I may have the terms or processes off, I can't remember the article.
 

Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
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Their forum name makes it that they have an obvious bias. Not sure why that crap is even tolerated here.
You mean ondma, or backwards AMD No ! ?? We know, just can't act on it by forum rules, but he is watched.

Also quite often ignored since the bias is obvious.
 

Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
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I edited my post as to not get infracted, but yes that is what I was talking about.
Yes, when people see obvious bias, they quite often just ignore what was said. Sad to see people do that to themselves. (bias)
 
Mar 11, 2004
23,031
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id like to see an actual tech paper written about this or some form of real credible proof.

Its a number game larry, you have 10,000 people using the same product, your bound to find issues with it faster then a product which has 1000 users.
And in the IT world, Intel has that much more market share still to date.

This is why exploits are being found for intel processors, because it pays that much better to find exploits for them.

Soon i predict were going to start finding exploits for ARM, as we are starting to get there with that many ARM Devices handling and controlling sensitive information.

WTF? And you're a mod on a tech forum?

Credible proof? You can't even be bothered to click the link apparently? Because it linked to the paper that details this.

FFS, even Intel released an advisory (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00290.html) for this issue so I'd love to hear your rationale for why you're acting like it doesn't even exist.

No, that's not the reason at all. Have you been living in a cave the past few years? This ties into all the stuff that Intel was catching major flak for starting a few years ago. Most of it is unique to Intel's hardware, and there's been a lot of research showing this and why.

Some of this stuff did affect AMD and even ARM (Meltdown for instance affected some ARM processors but not AMD), but there's reasons that Intel has been particularly vulnerable and it has nothing to do with prominence and everything to do with Intel not taking the security of their chip designs seriously enough. Some of this stuff was even told to them like a decade ago about its potential security ramifications and Intel chose to ignore it.

Does this mean there aren't security issues with other products? No, and absolutely security in general is lacking across the board with tech related stuff (as evidenced by the recent revelation that Apple had some security flaw in their apparently ironically named "secure processor" that went unpatched for years).




You cannot call a mod out by his title,
when he is posting as a member.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director
 
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DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
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NetCat relies on two Intel technologies: RDMA and DDIO. DDIO is the primary culprit here. AMD has not, to my knowledge, even attempted something like DDIO. Securing it may be completely impossible.

The whole point of DDIO is to allow CPUs in a cluster to write directly to another CPU's cache, even if the CPU isn't local to the machine. It certainly is a nice feature for large clusters, but . . .

Anyway, you can't simply dismiss this as the sort of exploit that would be found in EPYC machines were proliferation higher. AMD hasn't implemented any feature that permits direct writes to cache from outside the system. Such a feature is lovely until you are living in a world where people want to compromise the integrity of your systems.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
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Sep 28, 2005
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for the record i am not saying that there aren't any exploits, i am saying id like to see any credible proofs that intel skimped on said security because of profit issues which was mentioned.

So your saying with all the exploits left open Intel is Faster?
I highly don't think so, Ryzen has a strong performance point, and i don't think intel even left with the exploits would be that much faster if any at all.

So again, id like to see someone specifically write a technical article in regard to intel deliberately allowing said exploits to increase performance on there processors.