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I really don't think that the speculative execution _implementation_ was in any spec whatsoever. The fact that it did the protection domain check later in the
by int0x80 9y ago
I really don't think that the speculative execution _implementation_ was in any spec whatsoever.
The fact that it did the protection domain check later in the process was not documented by Intel at all for example.
Having said that, the implementation was (obviously) available for Intel engineers and they didn't spot the problem in 10+ years.
Bugs will happen, especially this kind of bugs that people generally haven't had in mind in the past.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoWas is a unintentional bug, or was a deliberate design tradeoff favoring performance over security?
- int0x80 9y agoI'm assuming the former, but I could be wrong.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoThe risk of speculative updates to branch predictor and page tables was known to the research community for a while. Even if it was initially an unintentional bug, they had plenty of time to take precautions against it by prohibiting speculative updates.