Off topic. But It’s going to get harder and harder to sneak backdoors into hardware now the internet age is upon us. Every time they do within 6 months to a year it has to be patched out again when someone finds the hole.
In hardware?
No. It’s just as easy.
After all, we do have the Management Engine.
It’s not a backdoor bug, it’s a feature! 
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But that’s an example where some companies are opting to turn it off for that very reason (see System76)
Yeah, but on a lot of systems, it’s not ready.
The problem is the level of risk associated with doing this.
If you break it, you need to have a dump of the nvmem that you can use a jtag tool to fix your motherboard with.
Point still stands. intel got bad press for iME ( and still are ). Enough that some vendors are selling products with it disabled. It won’t be long before another vulnerability is found. AMD have their PSP equivalent also in AGESA Ryzen.
Hey who dares link my old thread here!
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Someone with an annoyingly good memory.
Nah it’s not even two weeks old. But seems a lot of people have already forgotten. But I don’t blame them, not everyone has the time to keep that on their mind all the time.
Interesting stuff I just found from 2004 about early speculative execution optimizations.
Cache filtering techniques to reduce the negative impact of useless speculative memory references on processor performance
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And really… when it comes down to it… where AMD might sorta i dunno but they could have a possible invulnerability we KNOW Intel has a MASSIVE issue. Kind of issue requiring massive code re-writes over a period when in the tech world things slow to a crawl. The kind of issue where they won’t even release how it can be exploited until patches roll out because it’s just that bad.
That’s funny I don’t care who you are.
Awesome marketing idea there for AMD. Our chips have an INvulnerability in the ALSR module.
On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 3:09 PM, Andi Kleen andi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
This is a fix for Variant 2 in
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.htmlAny speculative indirect calls in the kernel can be tricked
to execute any kernel code, which may allow side channel
attacks that can leak arbitrary kernel data.
Why is this all done without any configuration options?
A competent CPU engineer would fix this by making sure speculation
doesn’t happen across protection domains. Maybe even a L1 I$ that is
keyed by CPL.
I think somebody inside of Intel needs to really take a long hard look
at their CPU’s, and actually admit that they have issues instead of
writing PR blurbs that say that everything works as designed.
… and that really means that all these mitigation patches should be
written with “not all CPU’s are crap” in mind.
Or is Intel basically saying “we are committed to selling you shit
forever and ever, and never fixing anything”?
Because if that’s the case, maybe we should start looking towards the
ARM64 people more.
Please talk to management. Because I really see exactly two possibibilities:
- Intel never intends to fix anything
OR
- these workarounds should have a way to disable them.
Which of the two is it?
Linus
:)~
Well, who is being fooled by the spin?
People purchasing hardware for data centers? Or less informed consumers?
I guess my ignorant opinion is that you need to fix it. If not, you lose market share.
Or perhaps they roll out a new chipset + range of CPUs, and life goes on. Like they do every 6 months.
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Intel shills… very very very fooled.
Dammit you!
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Unfortunately they are going to in the next Linux Kernel releases until the AMD patch hits that disables the workaround on AMD CPUs.
Because the security is more important then a few % in performance for a release or two.
On a sidenote it’s always amazing how even on news of this scale the intel stock just sits there and is like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Was the same with the Management Engine stuff…
/edit
also holy shit 276 posts… not finishing this topic now :X
Not what I’m talking about. It was literally one line that excluded AMD processors from the great gimping of 2018.