Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exploits

Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by emn13 on Thursday January 04, 2018 @01:57PM (#16072994)

The attack is pretty brilliant; but it's also not quite novel. Cache-timing attacks aren't new; certainly CPU suppliers should have known the general issues at hand for... at least a decade? See e.g. Colin Percival's somewhat related attack on hyperthreading way back in 2005: http://www.daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf

Actually exploiting the information leakage isn't easy; and its compounded by the secrecy surrounding cpu internals. So I think they definitely deserve some blame here. Yes, the PoC is new. But the attack surface was widely known more than a decade ago, and they chose to punt the issue onto software; a solution that was unlikely to really hold water.

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Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by contrarian_ on Thursday January 04, 2018 @02:05PM (#16073077)

2006: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.190...

From the abstract:

> Information leakage through covert channels and side channels is becoming a serious problem, especially when these are enhanced by modern processor architecture features. We show how processor architecture features such as simultaneous multithreading, control speculation and shared caches can inadvertently accelerate such covert channels or enable new covert channels and side channels.

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Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by emn13 on Thursday January 04, 2018 @02:09PM (#16073112)

Hey, there you go! I kind of doubt Intel really didn't know about this risk.

They were cutting corners; that deserves some opprobrium - especially given their market-dominating position over this timespan.

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