Slashdot Mirror
The Elite Intel Team Still Fighting Meltdown and Spectre (wired.com)
Throughout 2018, researchers inside and outside Intel continued to find exploitable weaknesses related to Meltdown and Spectre class of "speculative execution" vulnerabilities. Fixing many of them takes not just software patches, but conceptually rethinking how processors are made. From a report: At the center of these efforts for Intel is STORM, the company's strategic offensive research and mitigation group, a team of hackers from around the world tasked with heading off next-generation security threats. Reacting to speculative execution vulnerabilities in particular has taken extensive collaboration among product development teams, legacy architecture groups, outreach and communications departments to coordinate response, and security-focused research groups at Intel. STORM has been at the heart of the technical side. "With Meltdown and Spectre we were very aggressive with how we approached this problem," says Dhinesh Manoharan, who heads Intel's offensive security research division, which includes STORM. "The amount of products that we needed to deal with and address and the pace in which we did this -- we set a really high bar."
Intel's offensive security research team comprises about 60 people who focus on proactive security testing and in-depth investigations. STORM is a subset, about a dozen people who specifically work on prototyping exploits to show their practical impact. They help shed light on how far a vulnerability really extends, while also pointing to potential mitigations. The strategy helped them catch as many variants as possible of the speculative execution vulnerabilities that emerged in a slow trickle throughout 2018. "Every time a new state of the art capability or attack is discovered we need to keep tracking it, doing work on it, and making sure that our technologies are still resilient," says Rodrigo Branco, who heads STORM. "It was no different for Spectre and Meltdown. The only difference in that case is the size, because it also affected other companies and the industry as a whole."
Intel's offensive security research team comprises about 60 people who focus on proactive security testing and in-depth investigations. STORM is a subset, about a dozen people who specifically work on prototyping exploits to show their practical impact. They help shed light on how far a vulnerability really extends, while also pointing to potential mitigations. The strategy helped them catch as many variants as possible of the speculative execution vulnerabilities that emerged in a slow trickle throughout 2018. "Every time a new state of the art capability or attack is discovered we need to keep tracking it, doing work on it, and making sure that our technologies are still resilient," says Rodrigo Branco, who heads STORM. "It was no different for Spectre and Meltdown. The only difference in that case is the size, because it also affected other companies and the industry as a whole."
Wrong.
Potential Impact on Processors in the POWER Family
the third vulnerability, CVE-2017-5754, is known as Meltdown, and allows user-level code to infer the contents of kernel memory.
The Firmware and OS patches released by IBM in February and March 2018 to address the original Meltdown vulnerability (CVE-2017-5754) also address the L1TF/Foreshadow vulnerability, except for Power 9 Systems running with KVM Hypervisor. OS patch for Power 9 KVM Systems will be made available soon. The Firmware and OS patches for all other Power Systems are available in this blog below.
We are committed to helping our clients address these vulnerabilities and have introduced an offer for pre-POWER7 clients to upgrade their security profile and protect against Spectre and Meltdown through the purchase of POWER8 or POWER9 systems and available migration services, security support, and financing offers.
Meltdown is an Intel problem. Spectre is only a problem if you use Just-In-Time compilation on your system. The obviously solution is to simply not use JIT in the first place. Nothing fundamentally needs it, it simply makes the execution of unverified code faster. Nobody writing applications needs to worry about Spectre... unless you are writing a JIT compiler. This is a very small number of applications and they can still run unverified code using an interpreter engine, it's just a bit slower.
The solution is simple: dump JIT.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Rumor has it they were faster at executing x86, and also providing higher clock speeds on common socket architecture,
Rumor is false. As a cheap bastard, I tried the cheapass architectures, which sucked until the k7 came out. Cyrix chips were stunningly cheap, but also staggeringly slow. AMD chips were in the middle in both regards, with Intel by far fastest and most expensive. But then Athlon showed up and knocked Intel's socks directly off for a time, especially in multiprocessor systems where Hypertransport was a drastic improvement.
However, what is often missed in the analysis is that until recently, Intel was the world leader in process technology for years. Even without failing at security design, that gave them a part of their performance advantage. But those days are now gone, so what's Intel got over AMD? Answer, nothing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"