6 ms·

Since gruez mentioned it, I'll note Intel also pushed Itanium which had security benefits almost nobody talks about in x86 vs Itanium discussions. Secure64, co-

• close04 8y ago
  Itanium is dead, after 15 years on the death bed. To my knowledge there is no plan to launch any new Itanium CPU. The only reason the 9700 was launched in 2017 is to serve as a drop-in replacement for old CPUs, most likely for contractual obligations. There's simply no "killer feature" for Itanium. It's not coming back.
  • nickpsecurity 8y ago
    That serves my point that introducing a security-enhanced processor didn't work for Intel. i432 APX and i960 also failed at a loss of over a billion dollars so far when Intel tries to make better, safer CPU's. The customers wanted backward compatible with x86's warts, highest performance per dollar, and decreased energy. That's what Intel gave them at billions in profit. They're making patches for the security weaknesses and/or fixing them in newer CPU's. Vendors of insecure processors still dominate while the few processors with better security sell almost nothing. So, Intel should continue to make deliberately insecure processors and patch them since that's what people pay for. It's the market's fault for rarely buying anything better. Plus, voters not doing something about patent reform which would've led to more x86 competitors. The Chinese supplier is an interesting development where we might get a secure-ish x86 that way. "There's simply no "killer feature" for Itanium. It's not coming back." I just named its killer feature: security enhancements that make it hard to inject code into it. Most security audits of OS's find problems. The one of SourceT on Itanium didn't find a way to inject code into it since it used hardware to mitigate and contain most of that. Whereas, the protections on x86 are a source of vulnerabilities at the moment. Unfortunately, that was the only company that I'm aware of which saw that potential. The market's direction means they're porting the product to insecure hardware right now. Who knows what they'll come up with since it's impossible to secure software on insecure hardware. I'm so grateful to the markets for buying such things so little that they basically don't exist in the mainstream space. Note: Another example was Cell processor. Green Hills, who make INTEGRITY-178B OS for high security, did an assessment of the Cell processor for baking security into systems. It had some nice capabilities for that. Market wasn't going to buy it even to protect their systems, though. So, they're not pushing that.
    • close04 8y ago
      > Intel should continue to make deliberately insecure processors and patch them since that's what people pay for. Unfortunately... What's more disappointing is that while you expect the average Joe to go for shiny-new-fast, enterprises should have been a little more restrained. But hey, it's only an issue when it's found and with the power of hindsight all decisions are easy.
      • nickpsecurity 8y ago
        It wasn't hindsight: we've been publishing and describing these risks along with techniques to mitigate them for decades. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16092183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16092183 Mainstream security ignores it for political reasons. They're like a cliche that pretend all prior work that's not like theirs or are outside their social groups didn't happen. Enterprise ignores it since management gets rewarded for either high-growth or low-cost deployments. Those tend to favor insecure deployments. The consumers don't care enough for I guess psychological reasons. They don't even adopt usable, free stuff like Signal most of the time. Much less paid options. The high-assurance, security field has steadily done their part producing secure versions of hardware and software to address these risks. They usually knock out entire classes of attack. Almost nobody uses them outside of aerospace and defense. For hardware, few companies will build the secure prototypes since prior examples went bankrupt. The Spectre/Meltdown situation gives potential to use it as a buzzword pushing new hardware. That hardware needs to be totally compatible with existing OS's/RTOS's and C language, though, with almost no performance or cost hit. I think secure ARM's or MIPS's are best start. CoreGuard is example targeting them plus RISC-V. We'll see what happens.
        • close04 8y ago
          Because the regular timing attacks were always relatively easy to mitigate in software with low performance penalties? Unless I'm misreading your comment, you're saying Meltdown and Spectre are just the "run of the mill" cache timing attacks about which tens or hundreds of papers were written in the past years. In which case the same mitigations should still apply since they have been used in cryptography for decades. If this is the case and there's nothing more to them, and since you appear to be working in the field, I have one question: what is it that triggered this kind of response now that wasn't already triggered by the swath of already existing papers?
• saati 8y ago
  Correct me if I am wrong, but I think later Itaniums got OoO and speculative execution too.