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

Re:"I bet they were instructed to ignore the risk"

[TheRaven64]

To quote Linus "A *competent* CPU engineer would fix this by making sure speculation doesn't happen across protection domains."

That's bullshit. When Intel introduced speculation across protection domains everyone including Linux was happy because it reduced system call costs. Without this, as soon as you get to a syscall / sysenter instruction, you stall the pipeline until all pending instructions have been committed. On a modern Intel CPU with close to 200 instructions in flight at a time, that's a measurable performance overhead.

We've known for a long time that side channels of this kind were possible, but not that they were performant. The new attacks are not interesting because they're side channels that allow data to be disclosed, they're interesting because they're side channels that allow disclosure far faster than previously believed. CPU designers believed that this kind of attack could only be exploited to get a bit every few seconds, at which rate it's not really worth trying as an attack and is pretty easy for software to spot (hmm, why is this thread at 100% and triggering insane numbers of cache misses? Looks malicious...). Now we know that you can use these attacks to get data at about 0.5MB/s, so you can scan the whole of memory in a few minutes.

Re:"I want repaired processors for free"

[AmiMoJo]

Some people are seeing >50% performance loss. Take a look at this graph: https://www.epicgames.com/fort...

Clearly they are going to need to spend some serious cash on upgrading their servers. The thread is full of players who can't connect.

Interestingly Intel's CPU data pages contain benchmarks. It will be interesting to see if they update them.