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Intel's greatest PR success in this mess has been to conflate Meltdown with Spectre. Only Intel is affected by Meltdown because of their design, and it is a mor
by sverige 9y ago
Intel's greatest PR success in this mess has been to conflate Meltdown with Spectre. Only Intel is affected by Meltdown because of their design, and it is a more easily exploited bug.
- EgoIncarnate 9y agoMeltdown is not only Intel. Some ARM and Apple designed ARM processors are affected by Meltdown as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability)#Affected_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili...
- makomk 9y agoThere are no products on the market shipping with the one ARM-designed processor affected by Meltdown.
- EgoIncarnate 9y agoI think that's mainly out of luck. If the exploit had been discovered two years later, the story would likely be different. Apple has been much more ambitious with their ARM processor designs and has shipping iOS and AppleTV products affected by Meltdown. Shipping or not, it illustrates, that Intel was not unique.
- HugoDaniel 9y agoNow can you argue that the given faulty design was not directly influenced by Intel conscious and deliberate bad decisions ?
- EgoIncarnate 9y agoI'm not sure what kind of answer you are expecting. All I am saying is that Intel is not uniquely in the wrong here. There is a whole industry of bad decisions. Whether the decisions were conscious, or only obvious in hindsight I can't say.
- djrogers 9y agoWhat’s your source for the Apple claim, as your link doesn’t support it.
- EgoIncarnate 9y ago"Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown. To help defend against Spectre, Apple has released mitigations in iOS 11.2.2, the macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 Supplemental Update, and Safari 11.0.2 for macOS Sierra and OS X El Capitan. Apple Watch is not affected by either Meltdown or Spectre." https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208394 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208394
- dogma1138 9y agoMeltdown is a Variant of Spectre this isn't how Intel classifies it, this is how Google Project Zero, and heck even Intel's competitor AMD classifies it. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/reading-pri... It's also not the scariest variant, it's easily fixed (performance degradation aside), doesn't require a microcode update to be fixed hence is 100% software mitigated, doesn't allow you to cross between guest and host memory address spaces and isn't remotely exploitable. On the other hand variant 1 and 2 are much scarier because they are the complete opposite of Meltdown.
- mtgx 9y agoMeltdown is not a variant of Spectre. Spectre itself has two variants. And Meltdown was the easiest to exploit. Spectre is "bad" because it affects everyone, but it's less exploitable than Intel's Meltdown.
- dogma1138 9y agoMeltdown is very much a variant of this, 3 variant exist 3.1 if you consider Meltdown on ARM. Meltdown is the easiest to exploit and the easiest to fix it’s also the least scary one as far as compromises go.
- paulmd 9y agoMeltdown is a specific type of Spectre exploit. While it's more easily exploited, it's also patchable with minimal performance impact, unlike Spectre in general.
- EgoIncarnate 9y agoPotentially minimal is probably more accurate. It's workload dependent. In some cases, such as frequent interrupts or system calls on older CPUs without the PCID and INVPCIB features to mitigate the cost, it can be be very expensive.
- pritambaral 9y agoNo, it's not. Please read the website of the attacks created by those who discovered and named them: https://meltdownattack.com https://meltdownattack.com and https://spectreattack.com https://spectreattack.com