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New Spectre 1.1 and Spectre 1.2 CPU Flaws Disclosed (bleepingcomputer.com)
Two security researchers have revealed details about two new Spectre-class vulnerabilities, which they've named Spectre 1.1 and Spectre 1.2. From a report: Just like all the previous Meltdown and Spectre CPU bugs variations, these two take advantage of the process of speculative execution -- a feature found in all modern CPUs that has the role of improving performance by computing operations in advance and later discarding unneeded data. According to researchers, a Spectre 1.1 attack uses speculative execution to deliver code that overflows CPU store cache buffers in order to write and run malicious code that retrieves data from previously-secured CPU memory sections. Spectre 1.1 is very similar to the Spectre variant 1 and 4, but the two researchers who discovered the bug say that "currently, no effective static analysis or compiler instrumentation is available to generically detect or mitigate Spectre 1.1." As for Spectre 1.2, researchers say this bug can be exploited to write to CPU memory sectors that are normally protected by read-only flags.
Do you work for Intel? AMD is not vulnerable to the newly announced exploits. Also the ones AMD is vulnerable too are low risk and hard to exploit, far lower risk than Intel only ones, which are trivial to exploit. Bottom line: AMD is VASTLY safer.
We will see whether this holds up, but at the moment Intel is the one that played it fast and loose in order to have a few percent more performance, while AMD was far more careful and conservative and is now far less at risk and maybe not at all due to massively higher effort to exploit the subset of these vulnerabilities where they are affected. It is still possible that an easy to exploit variant will eventually be found for AMD too, but at the moment there is none.
Given that AMD has already done some additional things against this class of exploits in Zen 2, it may be that Intel CPUs will be a continued problem for the next years, while the same things may be more of an annoyance on AMD or not even present. Well, market dominance is never a good thing. Quality almost always suffers and prices get inflated. It would be a good thing if Intel got cut down quite a bit in size.
Of course, many people now have do defend their bad decision to not even have looked at AMD and they are intent to muddy the waters.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It only has to be implemented once and copied. Re: Life.
Until viruses use it. Viruses were original POC.
Re: Javascript
And one based on Meltdown and/or Spectre could potentially bypass all security without any possible generic fix. So, obviously it'd be nice to know about it.
Yes, /rant. Who's going around burning their CPUs? The point is to find out as many of the vulnerabilities now to start introducing fixes in hardware. And knowing there are more varied variants means the fix needs to be more generic. It also means that we have to start honestly considering the possibility that javascript can be an attack vector against CPU bugs, so that's something to mitigate against where reasonable.
But, yea, let's not point out the potential scope of this or light an impetus to change CPUs to mitigate these risk! We should just not really cover it. Then if/when the attacks do come because people find out how to make them more doable, we're then really boned. I mean, it's not like it takes years for CPU designs to be developed and deployed to replace current CPUs.
ARM Cortex A8, 9, 12, 15, 17, 57, 72, 73, 75... all of those implement speculative execution are are all vulnerable to Spectre v1 and v2. Some also v3, v3a and v4
The A76 is only vulnerable to v1 and v4
https://developer.arm.com/supp...
IBM Power CPUs do speculative execution. IBM aren't fixing Power 6 and earlier.
Power 7, 8 and 9 have been patched apparently (requires both firmware and OS updates to mitigate)
I'm sure there's more.