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Intel Responds To Alleged Chip Flaw, Claims Effects Won't Significantly Impact Average Users (hothardware.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Hot Hardware: The tech blogosphere lit up yesterday afternoon after reports of a critical bug in modern Intel processors has the potential to seriously impact systems running Windows, Linux and macOS. The alleged bug is so severe that it cannot be corrected with a microcode update, and instead, OS manufacturers are being forced to address the issue with software updates, which in some instances requires a redesign of the kernel software. Some early performance benchmarks have even suggested that patches to fix the bug could result in a performance hit of as much as 30 percent. Since reports on the issues of exploded over the past 24 hours, Intel is looking to cut through the noise and tell its side of the story. The details of the exploit and software/firmware updates to address the matter at hand were scheduled to go live next week. However, Intel says that it is speaking out early to combat "inaccurate media reports."
Intel acknowledges that the exploit has "the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed." The company further goes on state that "these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data." The company goes on to state that the "average computer user" will be negligibly affected by any software fixes, and that any negative performance outcomes "will be mitigated over time." In a classic case of trying to point fingers at everyone else, Intel says that "many different vendors' processors" are vulnerable to these exploits. You can read the full statement here.
Intel acknowledges that the exploit has "the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed." The company further goes on state that "these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data." The company goes on to state that the "average computer user" will be negligibly affected by any software fixes, and that any negative performance outcomes "will be mitigated over time." In a classic case of trying to point fingers at everyone else, Intel says that "many different vendors' processors" are vulnerable to these exploits. You can read the full statement here.
What about video streaming (writing, compressing) with Intel's Quicksync? We do a lot of I/O. Presumably it's going to kill our performance. I wonder if a class action lawsuit will be incoming.
"Intel believes its products are the most secure in the world"
Yeah, more secure than all those other products who don't let you log in with an empty password.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
why are non broken AMD chips flagged intel?
Yeah, notice the part where they tried to spread the blame to other CPU manufacturers.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Nice try Intel, but phoronix benchmarks prove you wrong, and show even up to 60! % loss in some loads.
Intel says "Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data."
They do not say anything about read. This means exploit lets read protected memory.
I think their magic excuse 8-ball is broken too, cause I think this is the exact same excuse they've used for all their previous screw ups too.
All my users are above average.
This has the potential of making Intel recall the floating point bug times with great fondness, nostalgia, and affection.
I wonder, does the average computer owner also have a bank account or conduct any transactions with vendors whose websites are hosted on shared instance cloud computers? (hint: that would be everyone except maybe kim jong). You are impacted by this even if it's not a computer you own. Furthermore, while we don't know the full details of this, it's entirely plausible that the program running in user space could be a web page javascript, java plugin or adobe flash program. If so such web pages could harvest your private data including website passwords, your bitcoin key, or any number of things you don't want leaking.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I like how they've weaseled out of the whole fiasco (why didn't /. post a link to the original press release?):
"Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time".
I'm not sure I can read between the lines properly but I guess new revisions of Coffee Lake/Kaby Lake/SkyLake(X) CPUs are coming and they will contain a hardware fix (though it still seems highly unlikely considering how difficult it's to deploy a new hardware design - however unlike other fabless companies, like AMD/NVIDIA/ARM/etc Intel has everything under control). After all they've known about this issue for almost half a year.
Meanwhile as for consumer workloads they are correct. Two German websites have already tested a Windows build with a fix and found very little performance losses.
Phoronix has also run a number of tests on Linux and found out that only few (mostly artificial) tasks are seriously affected.
Intel home users may sleep well. As for enterprise customers no one has run virtualization tests yet though - that's what truly important for large deployments (clouds).
You'll now be running 1200-1600 servers depending on your workload.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Some ARM64 chips are affected as well actually. Citation: https://lwn.net/Articles/74039...
I don't see why they would name AMD since it's unaffected however. https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/...
When they had the Pentium floating point division bug they also said it wouldn't affect the average user. All they did was piss off their customers before they recalled the chips anyway.
Some people never learn.
If the 'sensitive information' they can gather includes credentials or tokens the user wouldn't otherwise have access to, it sure as shit allows modification of data
when did AMD say that? all reports say that both AMD and ARM are also affected
AMD CPUs are NOT affected. Quit spreading lies.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2
That was one of the most uninformative, denying-we-did-anything-wrong press releases I've read in a long while. Therefore I suspect it came from the legal team. If only Intel's CPU designers were as good as the Intel legal team.
Intel will soon be announcing a $29 CPU replacement program for qualifying customers.
Does not "corrupt, modify or delete data". Yes, nice. It can just steal your passwords and encryption keys and then use them to do that corruption, modification or deletion. A shameless lie by misdirection. Intel has no honor at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is on a computer. Apparently, you have no clue what that means. So to educate you (futile, I know): Computers can do tiny things very fast and very often and that results in not-tiny things. You argument is bogus.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Now I have nothing to complain about. Get the same performance with a much lower price.
As Intel has been caught red-handed doing massively illegal things several times, like any good criminal enterprise they of course have a first-rate legal team.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
For the average home user, are you saying this is a full-alarm fire?
I get why server farms are stocking up on Depends, but if I'm at home on a script-blocking browser, isn't my attack vector pretty small?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
AMD does not have the flaw. Try to keep up.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This bug is FUCKWIT, it's a new one and still under embargo. The test you ran is the older ME bug.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
Actually, I've been knowledgeable about CPUs since the days when I was doing chip-level repair on DG Nova III CPU boards but...whatever. You still have not explained even a tiny bit how having malware on your system (necessary for this to be of any impact at all) is OK, but if that malware can read kmem...HORROR! Did any of the ransomware or anything else which has killed tens of thousands of systems read kmem? No.
The Linux and Windows kernels are being rewritten in a rather complicated fashion, which includes a performance hit. These changes will have a bigger impact than a typical security patch. No one wants to do something like this unless it is truly necessary.
If all of the developers who have the details agree that something needs to be done, I'm willing to go along with it. When the guys who build something are worried about it falling over, you pay attention.
I would rather not see a POC until a patch is released, tested, and deployed. The implications of this bug are dire, and malware authors can turn a POC into real-world malware in under 48 hours---simple, historical fact.
Vendors have seen security patches reverse-engineered to produce malware within a week, so I'd be inclined to push this onto workstations and public-facing servers ASAP. Full details aren't available publicly yet, so maybe the danger is overblown. But it looks very bad right now, all things considered.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Do you have a link for that assertion? I've tried a couple searches using various combinations of "arm page table kernel" and came up empty.
What a load of bullshit.
The only ARM64's affected are those by Intel, because Intel "cleverly" re-used some of the low-level chip architecture.
From Google's post: "Testing also showed that an attack running on one virtual machine was able to access the physical memory of the host machine, and through that, gain read-access to the memory of a different virtual machine on the same host."
Source: http://security.googleblog.com...
So yes, for the average home user, no big deal. For anyone running something on a cloud provider, bigger deal that the host gets patched.
arm64: Unmap the kernel whilst running in userspace (KAISER)
ARM engineers are supplying the patches for ARM64.
KAISER is the original name of the patch set.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
AMD checks privileges before it runs the code. Intel chose to optimize their branch prediction in a way that checked the privileges AFTER the code was run, but before it was written/applied. This allowed a small window for someone to read the results of that illegal instruction before it was dumped for being flagged as an exception.
I've read some info that speculates that Intel likely gained some performance by letting a lot of branch predictions run and then dumping those that are flagged after the fact instead of checking each and every one before it was run (because a lot of branches are dumped anyway for other reasons, so small price to pay to let things run and be wrong.) I don't know for sure, though. Sounds to me like they skimped on some silicon to check in hardware and put more into branch prediction.
Basically the code runs like this:
Hi, I'm a user program with user rights. I'd like to know where the super secret memory address of this part of the system is so I can read from it... and maybe even write to it later with a different exploit.
AMD: No, you're in user land, you can't see kernel land.
end of story
Intel: Oh, let me fetch that for you... Here, I've typed up a handy map of things and notes on your way around the super-secret areas... just show me your security clearance first before I hand it over.
Your malware: *glances at map, notes*
Intel: WAIT... you're in user land. You can't have this. *lights the map and notes on fire after you've already seen them*
And that is relevant how? The whole discussion is 99.9...9% about AMD64.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Did you actually read the contents in detail, because the "tested processors" are not all equally vulnerable.
Incorrect. From the FAQ on the page you linked to:
Which systems are affected by Meltdown? ... We successfully tested Meltdown on Intel processor generations released as early as 2011. Currently, we have only verified Meltdown on Intel processors. At the moment, it is unclear whether ARM and AMD processors are also affected by Meltdown.
My spoon is too big.
... any negative performance outcomes "will be mitigated over time."
Meaning, when you buy a new CPU or computer - i.e. "fixed in the next release".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
From what I've read, this "problem" looks to be a design decision on the part of Intel. Speculative access needs to be fast, and making it subject to access control basically removes the benefit of speculative access.
Given how Intel the company operates, there's no way that this could be a bug
I myself would rather run with the current behavior, since I don't particularly care about the problem; it's more an issue for shared hardware, and I don't generally share my hardware.
Specter sounds like the worse of the two, to me, actually. In the paper for it they describe an attack where javascript is carefully crafted so that it generates specific processor instructions when compiled by the Chrome JIT compiler, and then the javascript is able to attack the browser host and read it's entire memory contents. And they have a working example of this supposedly.
Mark of the Coder fades from you. You perform Opening on World of Warcraft. Warcraft crits GPA for 4. GPA dies.
Based on other comments above, there is a fair chance you misunderstand the nature of the bug. It is reported that AMD validates requests for speculative execution before executing them, and Intel validates them afterwards. The bug is supposedly that it's possible to read the results of the speculative execution before the Intel chip notices that they were improperly executed. If that is so, then the AMD chips do *not* have this particular bug.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
As someone who worked in an Intel Validation group for SOCs until mid-2014 or so I can tell you, yes, you will see more CPU bugs from Intel than you have in the past from the post-FDIV-bug era until recently. Why? Let me set the scene: It’s late in 2013. Intel is frantic about losing the mobile CPU wars to ARM. Meetings with all the validation groups. Head honcho in charge of Validation says something to the effect of: “We need to move faster. Validation at Intel is taking much longer than it does for our competition. We need to do whatever we can to reduce those times we can’t live forever in the shadow of the early 90’s FDIV bug, we need to move on. Our competition is moving much faster than we are” - I’m paraphrasing. Many of the engineers in the room could remember the FDIV bug and the ensuing problems caused for Intel 20 years prior. Many of us were aghast that someone highly placed would suggest we needed to cut corners in validation - that wasn’t explicitly said, of course, but that was the implicit message. That meeting there in late 2013 signaled a sea change at Intel to many of us who were there. And it didn’t seem like it was going to be a good kind of sea change. Some of us chose to get out while the getting was good. As someone who worked in an Intel Validation group for SOCs until mid-2014 or so I can tell you, yes, you will see more CPU bugs from Intel than you have in the past from the post-FDIV-bug era until recently.
It's basically the same fuck-up as in the software industry: Profits and "time-to-market" prioritized over security.
To be fair, the existing laws are vague enough that good lawyers can talk judges and juries out of severe penalties. Thus, it's not technically "illegal", or at least not clearly illegal. "Devious" is probably a better word than "illegal". They dance in the grey areas of the law.
It's also the main reason why Hillary (and other tech-sloppy politicians) are unlikely to be prosecuted. Vagueness is a key tool of powerful lawyers and why regular folks are less likely to get away with stuff that plutocrats like OJ and Hillary get away with.
(I've been round and round in the Hillary email thing in many forums, and there are no known clear-cut laws to bust her on. Criminal prosecutions require "beyond a reasonable doubt". The law and the tech landscape provide plenty of doubt.)
Table-ized A.I.
Actually, not so quickly. Only because of Kernel-mode JIT.
Read it very carefully.
The fixes are being more careful in the bytecode verifier prior to JIT'ing (if that's even possible!), or isolating the JIT'd code into its own space, or considering eBFP bytecode loading to be as security sensitive as insmod. And... I can't see how splitting kernel space into its own page table would avoid this particular variant.
For more info about BPF, check this. Sadly, "... Tcpdump asks the kernel to execute a BPF program within the kernel context. This might sound risky, but actually isn't." didn't take timing attacks into consideration.
They haven't demonstrated a user-mode reading kernel memory just yet. Securing a Linux box on AMD is as trivial as disabling eBPF.
However, it really uncovers a fundamental issue in all JITs allowing what should be interpreted code to read things, using timing attacks, that it should not be able to (escaping its sandbox). Hence all the references about JavaScript - similar attack allows JavaScript code to read memory outside the JavaScript world, but as far as I can tell, not read anything that the JavaScript interpreter couldn't read (although it seems to require JIT compilation). If anything, it's a general class of attacks allowing anything to read about its underlying environment.
The gotcha on Intel chips is that user-mode-x86 code can use this same timing attack on the kernel. On AMD, the timing attack is nullified because speculative reads fail before triggering cache loads.
Intel PR monkeys are trying to take AMD down with them, let's make this clear:
For the 3 bugs, the biggest one only affect Intel CPUs, for bug 2 and 3:
AMD bug only affect THE SAME PROCESS, unlike Intel, which allows exploit to cross process
https://googleprojectzero.blog...
As shown, AMD was only vulnerable to "the ability to read data inside mis-speculated execution within the same process, without crossing any privilege boundaries."
The questioner said "We do a lot of I/O". If you do io 512 bytes at a time, this may be noticeable. But that was a poor choice to begin with. 8192 bytes can be a lot faster, even without this issue, and even more so now. Each disk read is a call into kernel space. To minimize the number of calls, grab more data each time.
Try different values and benchmark. It can make a big difference.
It's called an Opportunity Button.
Buy a brand new Intel processor next year!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You're describing Meltdown, Spectre is worse.
Spectre exploits the implementation of the CPU branch predictor to trick a high privilege process to speculatively execute some number of ROP-like gadgets. The victim process *doesn't* trip over any privilege checks.
This works because the Ivy Bridge, Haswell and Skylake indirect branch prediction state is shared between threads running on the same core. The Spectre paper claims that this also applies to AMD's Ryzen CPU's, but they didn't implement a working exploit.
Spectre doesn't depend on having the kernel memory mapped into the process, so probably isn't mitigated by FUCKWIT (er KPTI).
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
They are affected, but not by Meltdown but by Spectre
AMD's Zen processors are immune to all 3 vulnerabilities FYI.
Basically, this isn't an implementation bug, or even a design flaw... it's an architectural flaw, present in all modern CPUs.
Except those from AMD.
This is incredibly huge. To a first approximation, all computers are broken.
All computers made by Intel, anyway. They have always been shitty at branch prediction. That's why the P4 sucked so hard; it had a long pipeline and their branch predictor wasn't up to snuff, and branch prediction happened fairly early in the pipeline so you had to throw away many cycles when it mispredicted. Intel addressed this inadequacy by playing fast and loose with OoO to get a performance improvement, and now there's a vulnerability. This is just more typical incompetence from Intel, but this time it's really going to screw them because it has a significant performance impact. FDIV couldn't kill them because the performance impact of mitigation was minimal. But this is fundamentally different; people chose Intel CPUs because it reduced the number of nodes they would need compared to AMD. Now they're going to have to buy more nodes, erasing that advantage. Actually having to spend more money because of Intel's screwup will make them think twice about any more homogeneous, intel-based networks of computers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Look at the blog post I linked.
You mean the one that says "AMD provided the following link: http://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution? It contains the following in a table:
So yes, some of the attacks work against AMD processors. However, due to architectural differences, mitigation will involve minimal performance impact, unlike Intel. Once again, we see that AMD has superior architecture, and Intel has superior process technology.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They are affected, but not by Meltdown but by Spectre
To expand :
The whole shit storm affecting Intel, is about boundary violations.
That means kernel information leaking into user-land software.
Intel CPU are affected by this (they check access rights much later on, at a point where a lot has happened and that "lot" can be carefully timed and analyzed to leak information out of the kernel space). It allows to have information cross the boundary between kernel and users-space.
AMD CPU are not affect by this (they check access rights ealier, at a point where not much has happened yet). Yes you can also do timing to guess stuff from speculative execution, BUT you are shut out of the kernel space. You can only user this to have one process leak its own memory space. You cannot use this to get things from the kernel into some javscript code, the CPU will block access to early for the attack to actually work.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yeah so the fact that some obscure ARM64 demo board that hasn't seen that much actual real-world deployment (*) happens to be made by AMD, means that suddenly everybody must lose confidence in all x86-64 hardware, not only Intel's (which is totally affected by the security shit storm) but also AMD's (whose AMD64 is immune to the actual security leaking exploit. It's not affected by the security shit storm. It's just affected by some proof of concepts where an application can leak it's own memory space) ?
While technically, the words of Intel aren't completely wrong (yup, there exist an obscure chip made by AMD that is affected), it's completely misleading: they want to make you think that it's affecting all manufacturer across the board similarly. It's not. Most of what AMD produces, all the chips you might be thinking about when thinking of AMD (i.e.: the AMD64 chips that make a sizeable chunk of AMD's production, and nearly all of their CPU production), they are not affected.
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*: honnestly, are there any significant number of machine shipped with Opteron-A ? I mean actual servers deployed in production widescale, not some SBC sold in small quantity to people wanting to experiment with the tech.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Except this bug predates 2013. I know it's hard when facts don't conform to your bias, but you'll survive.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.