How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst' chip flaw

Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by jchw on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:46PM (#16073919)

Because other than the flaw that leaks information, speculative execution of instructions that never retire leave absolutely no trace at all. There's nothing to detect.

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by willtim on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:18PM (#16074179)

Not true. It turns out that Speculative evaluation has side-effects, it changes the contents of the cache. This is the big issue. The contents of the cache are then detectable with timing attacks (the Spectre variants, but perhaps more will be discovered). Meltdown combines this flaw with Intel's own "surprising design" of speculative evaluation, which omits security checks and pulls kernel memory into the cache.

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by jchw on Friday January 05, 2018 @12:06AM (#16076689)

Yes that's what I was saying:

>other than the flaw that leaks information,

But that flaw is pretty hard or impossible to detect.

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