OpenBSD's De Raadt Pans 'Incredibly Bad' Disclsoure of Intel CPU Bug (itwire.com)

troublemaker_23 quotes ITWire: Disclosure of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, which affect mainly Intel CPUs, was handled "in an incredibly bad way" by both Intel and Google, the leader of the OpenBSD project Theo de Raadt claims. "Only Tier-1 companies received advance information, and that is not responsible disclosure -- it is selective disclosure," De Raadt told iTWire in response to queries. "Everyone below Tier-1 has just gotten screwed."
In the interview de Raadt also faults intel for moving too fast in an attempt to beat their competition. "There are papers about the risky side-effects of speculative loads -- people knew... Intel engineers attended the same conferences as other company engineers, and read the same papers about performance enhancing strategies -- so it is hard to believe they ignored the risky aspects. I bet they were instructed to ignore the risk."

He points out this will make it more difficult to develop kernel software, since "Suddenly the trickiest parts of a kernel need to do backflips to cope with problems deep in the micro-architecture." And he also complains that Intel "has been exceedingly clever to mix Meltdown (speculative loads) with a separate issue (Spectre). This is pulling the wool over the public's eyes..."

"It is a scandal, and I want repaired processors for free."

Comments

Correction needed

[fubarrr]

>is hard to believe they ignored the risky aspects. I bet they were instructed to ignore the risk

The specific issue that Pentium line CPUs: a) do privilege check asynchronously; b) do it only for the "winning" execution branch was very well known among CPU design community.

Intel architects even bragged about that as their "innovation" in industry journals and filled a number of patents for that (this is the reason amd privilege checker runs on all branches)

Patent infringement

[sjbe]

No, it's not tricky to pull off.

If it wasn't tricky to pull off then it would have already been done on a wide scale. I'm not saying it's impossible but it is going to be a much tougher nut to crack than open software. Mostly for economic reasons rather than technical ones.

- Research and make use of expired patents extensively, file new ones defensively.

Who is going to do this? Who has the funding and more importantly the incentive to do this? IBM received 8000 patents in 2016 and numerous other tech companies received thousands more each. Exactly how do you plan to match that sort of pace? How do you plan to produce anything really useful without infringing on a pile of those patents? Not to mention fending off the flesh eating lawyers that give those patents teeth...

It's more capital intensive than software, but it's also not that expensive either.

I'm a certified accountant and an industrial engineer. I do cost accounting for a living. It is a LOT more expensive than software no matter how clever you are. There is a reason gross margins in manufacturing hardware are far thinner than in software. You don't escape these costs by just doing design either. Someone eventually has to make the product and that will require substantial capital. Then you have the cost of distributing the product. Unlike software which can be sent across the net for nearly free, hardware has to be shipped, stored and turned into products, all of which cost non trivial amounts of cash. If you think it isn't substantially more expensive than making and distributing software you haven't done the math.

Re:He and Linus are Spot On

[Lothsahn]

Thank you for noting that you're not 100% sure it's right, and for the excellent summary. There's a ton of misinformation going around, especially with 0100010001010011 dude on Slashdot repeatedly posting that Meltdown is INTEL ONLY, which is false, as some ARM products are affected. What is true is that Meltdown does not affect AMD and affects only a few of ARM's processors.

As you state, it's important to rely on the original sources. Here is each CPU vendor's response to the security issues:
https://www.amd.com/en/corpora...
https://www.intel.com/content/...
https://developer.arm.com/supp...

Here are two corrections to make:
1) Meltdown:
One of your bold statements "AMD and ARM are not affected" is untrue. See here, from ARM directly:
https://developer.arm.com/supp...

ARM has confirmed that A75 is vulnerable to Meltdown. In addition, A15, A57, and A72 are vulnerable to a variant of Meltdown (Variant 3a) which ARM has added. ARM has stated that they believe this variant is NOT exploitable, however, there is already userspace code out there that can do some limited exploits:
https://github.com/lgeek/spec_...

AMD is not affected by Meltdown, in any form. From AMD's press release:
https://www.amd.com/en/corpora...

2) Variant 1: While other vendors may require application changes to address this issue, AMD appears to be able to address this with an OS update, based on their post:
https://www.amd.com/en/corpora...


Summary:
Variant 1: Some manufacturers (ARM) appear to not be able to fix it and are recommending compiler changes, but AMD will fix this in OS updates. Unclear how Intel is addressing this vulnerability.
Variant 2: Correct, from what I can tell.
Variant 3 (Meltdown): Affects nearly all Intel (within the last 10 years) and ARM A75 chips. AMD not affected.
Variant 3a (Modified Meltdown): Affects a larger set of high performance ARM chips

Finally, Intel has done a terrible job (intentionally?) at conflating the two issues, which is unfair. These are 3 separate security issues, with their own priorities and impacts. If you read Intel's official press release for this issue, there's no differentiation between variants 1-3, like there is for AMD and ARM:
https://www.intel.com/content/...