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A comment on Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exploits. Parent comment

Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by coliveira on Thursday January 04, 2018 @02:18PM (#16073187)
Except that these CPUs were not designed to be insecure. CPU makers spent decades marketing their architectures as able to support the implementation of secure operating systems. All of a sudden it is clear that this is not possible without heavy dose of software stopgaps. It is a fundamental flaw on CPU architecture that was not disclosed by these companies.
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Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by pkaye on Thursday January 04, 2018 @02:22PM (#16073234)
Neither was anyone else aware of these class of security issues with CPUs until recently.
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Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by pixl97 on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:25PM (#16073742)
Oh people were aware, we just neglected the issues IBM and other time sharing systems learned in the 70s.
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Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by pas on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:24PM (#16074225)
Was there anything like this back then? (Speculative execution, L1 cache, branch prediction all in the same ISA?)
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Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by pkaye on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:45PM (#16073914)
If they were aware, why didn't anyone raise this issue till now?
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Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by ionforce on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:54PM (#16073988)
The people that were aware were probably extracting value out of the fact that not everyone knew.

Could be not worth making a public stink, could be weaponizing the exploit, could be coordinated disclosure.

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Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by pkaye on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:05PM (#16074076)
you mean all these security researchers kept it a secret for the last decade or two?
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Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by coliveira on Thursday January 04, 2018 @05:02PM (#16074495)
Until a few days, researchers couldn't prove that this was possible because there was no example of such exploits. But there was the idea that this could be possible. Also this doesn't mean that people with other interests didn't have their own versions of this exploit and kept it a secret.
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Re:Intel Issues Updates to Protect Systems from Security Exp... by amygdyl on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:27PM (#16073757)
I'm scarred by the CISC - RISC wars, which were serious for my business at the time. So in a year I'm anticipating Open VMS I'm x64 , having a indelible memory of the memory space rings and system calls depending on explicit separation, I remember thinking to myself, well only four rings in Alpha are critical to VMS, and Intel Pentium has that many rings...so why don't they port straight to the main Intel platform? Is this leaking mode the reason?
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