4 ms·

What are the odds that the NSA already knew about this? Roughly 100%?

• djsumdog 9y ago
  I dunno. Potentially. But these are incredibly complicated bugs, which involve timing at the hardware level. There's nothing close to this in the Vault7/8 leaks.
• InclinedPlane 9y ago
  This is a toughie. These bugs are basically very difficult to mitigate completely without fixes at the hardware level. One might imagine the NSA being coy and patching their own OS's et al to the degree they can while working to exploit the bug in the wild. However, the reality is that this bug is almost worse for the NSA than for most other folks, because they have the most to lose if their security is breached. And they have a lot of machines out there. The idea of a bug of this severity that leaves no traces is probably leaving a lot of people at the NSA in cold sweats right now. Meaning that if they did discover it before other researchers it's questionable whether they would have tried to exploit it vs. driving towards the most rapid possible mitigation and fix.
• opportune 9y ago
  If I were a betting man, I'd place my bet on them knowing about this for a long time, and possibly even being behind the bugs' introduction in the first place
• user5994461 9y ago
  Pretty close to 100%. Google zero and academia researchers found it independently, following some talk about the concept a while back. The 3 letters agencies have people of the same calibre working full time on that. They could find it too.
• zipwitch 9y ago
  I'm not familiar with the intricacies of CPU design. What are the odds the NSA somehow arranged for these vulnerabilities to exist?