New Hardware Vulnerability Found in Intel Processors
The details are still very scarce, but a new and potentially huge vulnerability was discovered with pretty much all Intel processors, in hardware. The good news, it can be fixed through software, the bad news is that certain workloads will degrade Intel CPU performance.
The news broke yesterday evening through the register who wrote a piece on it. The bug is still not detailed and kept under embargo by Intel so that Microsoft, MAC and Linux OSes (kernel) can be patched. Basically (from what we read) the vulnerability lets users of a virtual machine (VM) access data of another VM on the same physical machine, that is a memory leak. Ergo with infected malware or access to the machine, in theory, it will be possible to read out data for the highest hierarchy in the processor, the Kernel. If that can be read out, everything can be read out including logins, passwords and so onwards.
Amazon announced it is doing massive maintenance on its services January 10th to update their machine, but also affected are cloud services from Google and Microsoft. The patches cannot be invoked on the firmware side of things, meaning it’s a software solution. And herein is a problem found, it has been reported that under specific workloads performance drops have been spotted ranging from 5 to even 30% on Intel processors. Patches for the Linux kernel are available and propagating, Microsoft will patch it’s OSes soon as well.
From the looks of it, this will hit Intel processors on an incredibly large scale, we think (thus this is not confirmed) all Intel processor supporting virtualization (VT-x) are affected. All AMD x86 processors (Opteron, Ryzen, EPYC, etc.,) are not affected to the vulnerability, so AMD performance will remain up-to-snuff.
So, for now, Servers and PCs where multiple clients can get access to the system are most likely vulnerable. But the performance hits could be widespread. The Register posted an in-depth piece on this, have a read here.
Senior Member
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Man thats amazing, intel went from having a 50% performance lead to possibly -25% in a year.
10/10 would design cpu again.
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How much the speculation fails? Does it effects SLAT too? (I guess yes since they are gonna to patch all azure clients too.. and this is a good change for EPYC.. toc toc AMD marketing?).
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Ouch, this will have a big impact on performance. Would be nicer at OS level if apps could be set as "Trusted" instead of incurring a performance hit on everything.
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Isn't The Register one of the worst news sites out there? Is this confirmed somewhere else?
(The low quality of that site is immediately evident, since they don't actually state which chips are affected. So they claim every Intel chip ever made is affected, which sounds like complete BS.)
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Roger That