Re:MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips
by adamsmith143 on Friday June 10, 2022 @12:42PM
(#31696473)
So there is no possible set of instructions that could block the particular behavior in the exploit?
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Re:MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips
by jprx on Friday June 10, 2022 @12:49PM
(#31696558)
You could maybe do it with lots of fences or just a ridiculous chain of NOPs after each branch such that the ROB is cleared before you have time to try to load a pointer speculatively.
In practice, both of these would probably kill performance, so I don't think either of these are great solutions. Recall we are targeting the kernel where everything needs to be as fast as possible.
Re:MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips
by fulafel on Saturday June 11, 2022 @02:57AM
(#31702556)
This gets into the turing completeness tarpit. Yes, it's possible to make a vulnerable implementation emulate a chip that is not vulnerable. And maybe even detect when you don't need to emulate and run natively some of the time.