Technology

They should name them after their investors and board members.

Sounds like Bond movies.

can't wait for "shellshock", "wildfire" and "collapse".

"whew* my horrible bubble sort implementation is safe from performance impacts

I just skimmed through the article and it seems like this vulnerability is only really meaningful on multi-user systems. It allows one user to access memory dedicated to other users, letting them read stuff they shouldn't. I would expect that most consumer gaming computers are single-user machines, or only have user accounts for trusted family members and whatnot, so if this mitigation causes too much of a performance hit I expect it won't be a big risk to turn it off for those particular computers.

This does sound like planned obsolescence to me...

Oop CPU sales are down! Leak one of our critical flaws to force people to upgrade!

I was going to say, AMD had a flaw of similar severity. And they won't have a fix for a few months for most affected CPUs, and that fix will likely incur a loss in performance.

Basically it sounds like both of these flaws are due to the security chip. I can't help but feel like these flaws are by design. /tinfoil

Downfall was disclosed to Intel a year ago but was on embargo until this week. Can't help but suspect that Intel waited for AMD to be impacted by a similar event to reveal downfall

So they created a massive vulnerability by misimplementing speculative execution which promised a, what, 10% speed gain tops and now that it was discovered you have to patch it and lose 50%? Genius.

ELI5, or ELIAFYCSS (Explain like I'm a first year CS student): modern x86 CPUs have lots of optimized instructions for specific functionality. One of these is "vector instructions", where the instruction is optimized for running the same function (e.g. matrix multiply add) on lots of data (e.g. 32 rows or 512 rows). These instructions were slowly added over time, so there are multiple "sets" of vector instructions like MMX, AVX, AVX-2, AVX-512, AMX...

While the names all sound different, the way how all these vector instructions work is similar: they store internal state in hidden registers that the programmer cannot access. So to the user (application programmer or compiler designer) it looks like a simple function that does what you need without having to micromanage registers. Neat, right?

Well, problem is somewhere along the lines someone found a bug: when using instructions from the AVX-2/AVX-512 sets, if you combine it with an incorrect ordering of branch instructions (aka JX, basically the if/else of assembly) you get to see what's inside these hidden registers, including from different programs. Oops. So Charlie's "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, B, A, A" using AVX/JX allows him to see what Alice's "encrypt this zip file with this password" program is doing. Uh oh.

So, that sounds bad. But lets take a step back: how bad would this affect existing consumer devices (e.g. Non-Xeon, non-Epyc CPUs)?

Well good news: AVX-512 is not available on most Intel/AMD consumer CPUs until recently (13th gen/zen 4, and zen 4 isn't affected). So 1) your CPU most likely doesn't support it and 2) even if your CPU supports it most pre-compiled programs won't use it because the program would crash on everyone else's computer that doesn't have AVX-512. AVX-512 is a non-issue unless you're running Finite Element Analysis programs (LS-DYNA) for fun.

AVX-2 has a similar problem: while released in 2013, some low end CPUs (e.g. Intel Atom) didn't have them for a long time (this year I think?). So most compiled programs wouldn't compile with AVX-2 enabled. This means whatever game you are running now, you probably won't see a performance drop after patching since your computer/program was never using the optimized vector instructions in the first place.

So, the affect on consumer devices is minimal. But what do you need to do to ensure that your PC is secure?

Three different ideas off the top of my head:

1. BIOS update. The CPU has a some low level firmware code called microcode which is included in the BIOS. The new patched version adds additional checks to ensure no data is leaked.

2. Update the microcode package in Linux. The microcode can also be loaded from the OS. If you have an up-to-date version of Intel-microcode here this would achieve the same as (1)

3. Re-compile everything without AVX-2/AVX-512. If you're running something like Gentoo, you can simply tell GCC to not use AVX-2/AVX-512 regardless of whether your CPU supports it. As mentioned earlier the performance loss is probably going to be fine unless you're doing some serious math (FEA/AI/etc) on your machine.

Shared use of servers is probably the main issue

Isn't that convenient?

Oh don't worry, you'll hear about that vulnerability in two years.