ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by cfallin on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @05:55PM (#19914233)

Yes, that's true, several of the vulnerabilities involve checks that are performed late (not at time of speculative access, but at some point before instruction commit). Not excusing the design choice at all, but it's conceivable that an engineer could make this choice if (i) side-channel effects of the speculation are not considered at all, and (ii) the postponement of the check allows the load latency to be reduced. Again, not justifying, and the vulnerabilities are terrible, but there does seem to be a rational-given-some-assumptions way to reach such a decision.

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Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by amluto on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @07:05PM (#19914704)

I’m not a CPU architect, but it seems like Intel saved a couple gates by putting garbage instead of zeroes in the pipeline.

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Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by amluto on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @07:49PM (#19924900)

After reading more of the (limited, publicly known) details, it looks like the data leaked isn’t, strictly speaking, total garbage. But I do wonder whether Intel got a meaningful latency improvement by putting potentially wrong data into the pipeline instead of using zeroes or stalling. Zeroes or a stall would require knowing that the data is invalid before continuing with execution, which could be a performance issue.

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Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by ct520 on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @01:12AM (#19916597)

Your not, but the gentlemen your replying to is. Bet you can’t guess where and what he worked on?

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Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by dang on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @03:12AM (#19917072)

Not sure how to read this, but if you meant it as a personal attack that's totally not ok here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by ct520 on Wednesday May 22, 2019 @02:05AM (#19978232)

Not sure how to read this either, but as a moderator if you strive to warn people on ambiguity you can’t discern I can assure you no harm intended per the rules cited

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Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by cfallin on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @01:34AM (#19916690)

Yup, I worked for a bit at Intel, but I don't speak for them, I wasn't involved in any of the designs under discussion, and everything I'm saying here is public knowledge in the computer architecture community. I figured that the perspective from the academic comparch world might be interesting.

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Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by ct520 on Wednesday May 22, 2019 @01:59AM (#19978204)

Hehehehe I love it! Thank you much. I was being a bit rousing/ambiguous as your commentary caught my attention and was a bit excited when I checked out your background.

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