Meltdown & Spectre

[DigDog]

i've looked around but i cannot find any thread titles with either, so here it goes. Move to the appropriate forum if necessary.

According to this article: https://www.theguardian.com/technol...fect-computers-intel-processors-security-flaw
and many more like it, Google's Project Zero has just released details of two massive security flaws affecting practically every platform in existence.

Meltdown is currently thought to primarily affect Intel processors manufactured since 1995, excluding the company’s Itanium server chips and Atom processors before 2013. It could allow hackers to bypass the hardware barrier between applications run by users and the computer’s core memory. Meltdown, therefore, requires a change to the way the operating system handles memory to fix, which initial speed estimates predict could affect the speed of the machine in certain tasks by as much as 30%.

The Spectre flaw affects most modern processors made by a variety of manufacturers, including Intel, AMD and those designed by ARM, and potentially allows hackers to trick otherwise error-free applications into giving up secret information. Spectre is harder for hackers to take advantage of but is also harder to fix and would be a bigger problem in the long term, according to Gruss.

Details are scant on what these actually do, but apparently meltdown is a flaw on how communication between CPU and RAM Kernel memory is handled, which would allow an attacker to access the full RAM kernel memory contents without any encryption; and Spectre is just "so complex that it will take a complete architectural design to fix and will likely take several years". Older machines

Happy 2018.

oh and because this wasn't disastrous enough, the temporary fix (some are already out, some will be out by Jan 9) is likely to slow down your processor by up to 30%, depending on the task.

 

[Beer4Me]

What? it was the 1st thread here before you posted.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/massive-security-hole-in-xeons-incoming.2532563/

Mods should close this thread as it is a duplicate.

 

[ddogg]

The white papers for both exploits can be found here https://spectreattack.com
Both papers give us a deep dive look into the exploits.

 

[DigDog]

What? it was the 1st thread here before you posted.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/massive-security-hole-in-xeons-incoming.2532563/

Mods should close this thread as it is a duplicate.

crap.
i went through the search function.

oh dreams of glory, to bring to AT perilous news! to be a saviour! a true hero! hailed by the masses, etc.

 

[nathanddrews]

We appreciate your efforts, O Great Herald!

... but we don't need another thread. ;-)