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Potential Impact of Spectre on Processors in the Power family
- chmaynard 9y agoDoes anyone know if the IBM AS/400 architecture is affected? Edit: I'm referring to the System/38 architecture that used capability-based addressing.
- skissane 9y agoThe AS/400 nowadays is called "IBM i". The note says IBM i is affected: "AIX and i operating system patches will start to become available February 12". Since the mid-1990s it has run on POWER so if POWER is affected it obviously would be too.
- dfox 9y agoAnother question is whether it is actually exploitable from OS/i userspace.
- skissane 9y agoWell, if you consider PASE lets you run AIX binaries, if it is exploitable on AIX the same exploit would probably work on IBM i. (PASE only supports a subset of AIX system calls though.) Also, if it is exploitable from Java, nowadays the IBM i JVM is J9, almost the same as AIX. (This used to be different – the "Classic JVM" was integrated into the TIMI infrastructure, so quite different from JVMs on other platforms.)
- carey 9y agoI'm more interested in the non-PASE (more accurately, non-Teraspace) situation. The single level store maps every program into the same address space. Will POWER speculatively access another user's data before it discovers that the pointer is invalid or the array index is out of range?
- justincormack 9y agoYes, it is an interesting case, I hope we get more detail than this paper soon.
- puzzle 9y agoYeah, they replaced their custom CISC with a POWER + a bunch of extra instructions + a special processor mode + RAM with extra bits.
- sllabres 9y agoI dont find something mentioning Spectre or Meltdown in the original blog post fom IBM, but POWER 6 (2007) is most probably not affected by Metdown as it is an in-order architecture.
- Fnoord 9y agoIts called IBM System i nowadays, and hasn't been called AS/400 since 2000 [1]. FTA: "We will provide further communication on supported generations prior to POWER7+, including firmware patches and availability." POWER7+ is used in since 2012. They all seem to be based on POWER architecture these days (first devices using PowerPC/POWER3 in 1997). Also of note, the firmware patches will be available on jan 9 but they also require OS patches. The Linux patches will be available on jan 9 and the AIX patches arrive on feb 12. They don't mention IBM i (OS/400) at all. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i
- chx 9y agoThat must be only Spectre, where did you read Meltdown...? This title is wildly inaccurate!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- KerrickStaley 9y ago+1. Meltdown and Spectre are distinct vulnerabilities, and Meltdown only affects Intel processors as far as we know.
- Fnoord 9y ago> and Meltdown only affects Intel processors as far as we know. I made a post stating the same, but this is not true [1]: ARM has reported that the majority of their processors are not vulnerable, and published a list of the specific processors that are affected. However, the ARM Cortex-A75 core is affected directly by the Meltdown vulnerability, and cores Cortex-A15, Cortex-A57, and Cortex-A72 are affected by variations of the Meltdown vulnerability. This contradicts some early statements made about the Meltdown vulnerability as being Intel only. A large portion of the current mid-range Android handsets use the Cortex-A53 or Cortex-A55 in an octa-core arrangement and are not affected by either the Meltdown or Specter vulnerability as they don't do out-of-order execution. This includes devices with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 630, Snapdragon 626, Snapdragon 625, and all Snapdragon 4xx processors based on A53 or A55 cores. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili... (contains further references)
- deepnotderp 9y agoArm reference designs and Apple too apparently.
- dang 9y agoOk, we've adjusted the title accordingly. The submitted title was "IBM POWER impacted by Meltdown/Spectre", which broke the HN guidlines (please read those before submitting: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
- pokoleo 9y ago> If this vulnerability poses a risk to your environment, the first line of defense is the firewalls and security tools that most organizations already have in place. How would firewalls mitigate these attacks?
- lgessler 9y agoI think they're imagining situations where an attacker could gain user-level access to a machine that normally wouldn't be accessible to them at all, e.g. a web server with a weak SSH login.
- mtkd 9y agoAS/400 attacks are a whole next level of interest after first wave of Spectre on Intel/AMD etc. This is a much bigger can of worms than any vendor is admitting to right now. Those documented Spectre attacks were crafted by a handful of researchers - the world knows about the class of attack now - it'll be months or years before mitigation is fully understood - if mitigation is even possible. You can guarantee there are a lot more people are looking to exploit than fix right now.
- dogma1138 9y agoA walled garden might not be perfect security but it is still some security. If you don’t run unvetted code on your system and it’s not directly accessible over the network you limit your attack surface considerably. Limiting the attack surface is also why browser mitigation against SPECTRE are worthwhile.
- InclinedPlane 9y agoThe only way to exploit these vulnerabilities is to run code on target machines. If that's not possible then the vulnerability is irrelevant. Using firewalls to keep attackers away from your vulnerable machines is a viable strategy in this case.
- paulie_a 9y ago>if it's not possible to run code We are doomed
- filereaper 9y agoNo word about mainframes yet. Are s390 and s390x still in-order? Given their high clock speeds I'd hazard they don't do much speculation.