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Intel's Chip Bug Fixes Have Bugs of Their Own (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by msmash on from the bugception dept.

From a report: Intel said late Thursday it is investigating an issue with Broadwell and Haswell CPUs after customers reported higher system reboot rates when they installed firmware updates for fixing the Spectre flaw. The hardware vendor said these systems are both home computers and data center servers. "We are working quickly with these customers to understand, diagnose and address this reboot issue," said Navin Shenoy, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel Corporation. "If this requires a revised firmware update from Intel, we will distribute that update through the normal channels. We are also working directly with data center customers to discuss the issue," Shenoy added. The Intel exec said users shouldn't feel discouraged by these snags and continue to install updates from OS makers and OEMs.

2 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Reminds me of the 2009 flu pandemic by Hal_Porter · · Score: 4, Informative

    In both cases there was a lot of worry about the threat. An countermeasure was rushed out, and it seems like the countermeasure may have some side effects.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    You have to wonder in each case if there's an element of overreaction going on.

    In the Meltdown/Spectre case it the browser vendors are going to fuzz the timing functions to make side channel timing attacks harder to pull off

    E.g.

    http://news.softpedia.com/news...

    Just like Microsoft and Mozilla, Google Chrome 64 will disable SharedArrayBuffer by default and modify the behavior of performance.now() by reducing precision from 5us to 20us in order to block exploits attempting to take advantage of the security vulnerabilities.

    Also you can block third party scripts using uBlock Origin.

    https://github.com/gorhill/uBl...

    --
    echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  2. There is a better fix available. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2, Informative

    Use AMD chips because they actually are immune to Meltdown and have already mitigated Spectre at the Microcode and OS level with a negligible impact on performance. Intel has yet to get their shit together and it's performance impact is growing with every new patch.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.