AMD's Zen 3 CPUs Are Susceptible to Spectre-Like Vulnerability

Re:AMD's Zen 3 CPUs Are Susceptible to Spectre-Like Vulnerab... by makomk on Sunday April 04, 2021 @07:57AM (#26688753)

The underlying AMD paper made the front page of HN a few days ago, though without much discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645903

It's an interesting vulnerability but of limited impact, since of course every fast modern CPU is affected by Spectre anyway. The main consequence seems to be that, at least in theory, this has to be disabled in order for certain Spectre mitigations to work correctly. I don't think anyone's found a practical attack using this yet.

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Re:AMD's Zen 3 CPUs Are Susceptible to Spectre-Like Vulnerab... by hpcjoe on Sunday April 04, 2021 @10:45AM (#26689816)

The operative phrase is "yet". Better safe than sorry. I've not read the paper yet, and I am curious on the performance impact. I don't mind trading some performance for better security. Because when exploits are found in the wild, its too late.

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Re:AMD's Zen 3 CPUs Are Susceptible to Spectre-Like Vulnerab... by mlyle on Sunday April 04, 2021 @12:26PM (#26690768)

The thing is, this can be disabled A) per thread, and B) can't leak from other processes (it's flushed on each context switch).

So really, we want certain processes with software based sandboxing -- e.g. Javascript interpreters-- to turn this off.

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