Eight New Meltdown-Like Flaws Found (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Researchers have found eight new flaws in computer central processing units that resemble the Meltdown and Spectre bugs revealed in January, a German computing magazine reported on Thursday. The magazine, called c't, said it was aware of Intel Corp's plans to patch the flaws, adding that some chips designed by ARM Holdings, a unit of Japan's Softbank, might be affected, while work was continuing to establish whether Advanced Micro Devices chips were vulnerable... The magazine said Google Project Zero, one of the original collective that exposed Meltdown and Spectre in January, had found one of the flaws and that a 90-day embargo on going public with its findings would end on May 7...

"Considering what we have seen with Meltdown and Spectre, we should expect a long and painful cycle of updates, possibly even performance or stability issues," said Yuriy Bulygin, chief executive officer of hardware security firm Eclypsium and a former Intel security researcher. "Hopefully, Meltdown and Spectre led to improvements to the complicated process of patching hardware."
Neowin now reports that Intel "is expected to release microcode updates in two waves; one in May, and the other in August."

Comments

Well, to be expected.

[Anonymous Coward]

Speculative execution bypasses the memory protection barriers for efficiency reasons. The actual problem is that cache coherence is global rather than per-process and its effects are measurable. That is the vector for wagonloads of side channel attacks. Speculative execution to addresses based on protected locations is just a rather elegant side channel attack since it does not count towards privilege violations and thus does not trigger an exception that would in turn cause a much larger impact on cache coherence and other measurable CPU state than what you are trying to measure.

Cache coherency is a side channel attack that will keep on giving for a long long while to come.

Re:Explain

[drinkypoo]

Also are the new ones in the category of silicon fix (halve a year cycle time at best) or microcode??

It depends on which CPU you've got. Intel has already announced that they are never going to fix a whole bunch of CPUs with microcode updates, in spite of having fixed some other CPUs which are about the same age. Some have stated that they believe this means that they can't fix them in microcode. Personally, I suspect that they can, but the performance impact would be beyond anything we've seen so far, so they're simply refusing to do so.

I'd like to see Intel outright forced to issue a fix for any processor where it is possible, for those customers who can accept the performance impact. Remember, Intel abused their market position over AMD — and that market position was based on a competitive speed advantage which was in turn based on compromising security! Not forcing them to fix it in every possible case is literally rewarding them for bad behavior. I would go so far as to say that they should also pay for replacement of any system compromised; they should pay a percentage of the new system price based on the industry average percentage cost of the CPU.

Re:Price down

[Lonewolf666]

It may take a while for AMD to get to the point where customers trust them more overall than they trust Intel.

From all I read on forums like this (not being in the "decider" circles myself), it takes time to build up a good reputation in the server market. Now AMD was almost out of the server business until a year ago, because their Opterons were quite a bit behind in performance. They were also not completely untouched by Spectre, albeit looking better than Intel in that regard.

Now AMD have an strong new line of server processors with Epyc, and they have left a better impression than Intel in the whole Meltdon/Spectre affair. So expect them to get quite a bit of interest by customers for Epyc's performance, and also a boost in getting to the point of "less distrusted than Intel".
But I still think it will be a relatively slow shift in the market, compared to the whims of the consumer market ;-)