If you read the article you will flip into the Berenstein Bears universe from the Berenstain Bears one.
How long until engineers discover that a CPU can’t be designed and built that can’t also be hacked?
As long as human beings create them.
One thing about modern CPUs is that they rely heavily on quantum mechanics, and if anyone told you they knew exactly how quantum mechanics worked they’re lying to your face.
The combination of Meltdown and Spectre, and the Russian meddling in the 2016 election, mean I pretty much hate computers now.
This was teased months ago, but that big bad spectre variant has finally been revealed.
OS patches have been issued.
The bad news is that Foreshadow attacks the L1 cache, and in cloud environments attackers could read the page tables of other VMs. The only way to fix this is to disable hyperthreading.
It’s not really Spectre because it’s Intel only. The hyperthreading bit is really scary for the enterprise.
The hits just keep on coming. This is separate from Spectre or Meltdown
Intel Statement:
So i guess we really do need to run everything on iPads.
Given the nature of this exploit it really aren’t a big deal unless you’re running VMs for third parties or working on shared infrastructure.
The moral to the story here is that SMT is insecure by design. That’s why OpenBSD no longer supports it.
Google researchers say Spectre is not going away:
It isn’t going away on existing hardware.
How bad is any future hardware going to suck?
It’s hard to … speculate
They’ll address Spectre but don’t worry, a new flaw will come eventually complete with a new spiffy name.
Addressing spectre without losing massive performance isn’t easy, it’s an entire class of attacks. It may not even be possible to fix it without giving up that performance, and we may see configurable “tolerance” for these vulnerabilities become a real mainstream thing.
Easy, just fix the problem, take the performance hit and then make the next round that much faster ;). heh
Well you were joking, but that probably is the answer. We’re coming to the end of the road with silicon, and will need to move to a compound semiconductor like gallium nitride to hop back on Moore’s law. And then by the time they tap out, the hope is that quantum computing can save us, which (and I actually don’t jest) leverages alternate universes to speed calculations.
All that stuff is possible, but really really expensive and hard to do, while silicon manufacturing is extremely mature and high yield today, so they’re trying to eke out as much performance as possible using “tricks” like symettric multiprocessing and speculative execution. Ultimately those tricks need to go away.
On the client side, if this becomes a “thing”, we might see a move towards a safer net, less javascript, better ability to control what we’re running on the machine.
On the server, VM side. Good luck.
That won’t happen. Software mitigations will be developed for each exploit, and they will move to hardware with new revisions.
No.
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