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Hyperthreading Considered Harmful

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the not-just-for-performance dept.

cperciva writes "Hyper-Threading, as currently implemented on Intel Pentium Extreme Edition, Pentium 4, Mobile Pentium 4, and Xeon processors, suffers from a serious security flaw. This flaw permits local information disclosure, including allowing an unprivileged user to steal an RSA private key being used on the same machine. Administrators of multi-user systems are strongly advised to take action to disable Hyper-Threading immediately. I will be presenting this attack at BSDCan 2005 at 10:00 AM EDT on May 13th, and at the conclusion of my talk I will also releasing a paper describing the attack and possible mitigation strategies."

4 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. I know it's Off Topic but by xintegerx · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    How do I boot Windows 98 into Safe Mode? I have LILO bootloader loading and it has 3 options - Linux, failsafe, and Windows. If I try to press the F8 key to get Windows to safe mode, it doesn't work. What is the easiest way to get Windows to boot into safe mode if I am using LILO that came with Mandrake Linux?

    (I don't know any better place to ask this question than fellow slashdot members)

    Thanks!

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    Cover your eyes and click this link!
    1. Re:I know it's Off Topic but by xintegerx · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      I'll try it right now. So instead of enter, I press F8?

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      Cover your eyes and click this link!
  2. hooray ! by maharg · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I have 2 Dell 6650s, loaded with 4 HT Xeons and 32Gb RAM each. However, I had to disable HT on them as the license for the application I'm running allows 8 cpus only; when it detected "16" cpus across the 2 servers, it refused to start. So this news actually makes me feel better about the fact that `top` only shows 4 cpus on each box :o)

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    $ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
    @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
  3. if microsoft can do this with ppc by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    why don't they have a ppc version of windows?

    just imagine the caos in the hardware business if you could buy ppc boards and cpu's just like intel/amd stuff and ppl could still run a native version of windows (if they wanted).

    in other news.. hackers at lin4xbox.ru have already announced the release of modifications and a linux distribution to run on the new xbox. film at 11.