5 ms·

When the AMD equivalent of MDS is made known and given an acronym it will be an acronym that Intel is immune to.

rossdavidh 7y ago
While it is no doubt true that there are likely some vulnerabilities in AMD's chips that don't exist in Intel's, it is also true that because Intel has a larger market share, that's where most of the work is going to be done to find vulnerabilities, by the bad guys as well as security researchers. Much like how Microsoft Windows used to have a lot more security problems than any other OS, because they had >90% market share, so no one bothered to develop malware for anything else. Monocultures invite epidemics.
- sam0x17 7y ago
  In this particular area though, it works both ways. Intel has so many researchers and resources, they are able to pursue tons of speculative execution / CPU doing something you wouldn't imagine it normally does experiments, and many of these find their way into their CPUs. A company with less resources might have less vulnerabilities of this nature simply because they don't have the resources to focus on that stuff in the first place. Just a theory.
- alexozer 7y ago
  I'm not exactly sure the monoculture argument is valid for Windows vs. Linux though; Linux still dominated server usage while Windows was attacked more often, despite the fact that you could potentially reap a much greater reward infecting a server. Unix-based OSs were just inherently more secure for the most part.
  - rossdavidh 7y ago
    While it's certainly true that Linux does much better on servers than laptop/desktops, I don't think it ever got to the >90% market share that Windows had on laptop/desktop (although admittedly that depends on whose estimates you look at). But servers certainly do differ in regards monoculture in important ways, relative to laptop/desktop. It's also possibly significant that Linux on servers is split between Redhat and Ubuntu and others, who have some non-trivial differences in regards to security updates, etc. None of which means that Unix-based OS's don't have inherent advantages in regards to security, just that not having a monoculture target on their forehead also helps.
zamadatix 7y ago
Still waiting on the AMD equivalent of Meltdown then?
throwaway2048 7y ago
What about when the intel equivalent that is 10000x worse and the whole universe explodes is made known and given an acronym?
cookiecaper 7y ago
AMD has fared better in the age of speculative execution attacks because they didn't allow their speculation to "cheat" and break hardware protection barriers, even though several of their major competitors did. While it's by no means a guarantee, it does say something about the engineering culture that they understood the theoretical risks of violating a protection barrier and chose to respect those boundaries, instead of dismissing the risk and going for the bigger stats. That deserves notice and approbation.
- makomk 7y ago
  Yeah, it really does seem like a fundamental difference in how AMD and Intel designed their processors. Researchers have found Intel processors allowing speculation to bypass hardware protection all over the place, and they just haven't found an AMD equivalent. Not only that, AMD have looked into this themselves and released an entire whitepaper explaining why this isn't possible: https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-whitepaper.pdf https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-whitepap... (With, interestingly, one exception. Apparently AMD CPUs allow speculative execution to ignore x86 segmentation. It's just that no-one cares because that's not used anymore. I'm not sure there have even been any mainstream OSes that used that for process isolation.) This is particularly bad for Intel because most of the SMT-based exploits can pretty much only be mitigated by disabling SMT entirely and taking such a substantial performance hit that they've been trying desperately to convince people not to.
  - wahern 7y ago
    > I'm not sure there have even been any mainstream OSes that used [x86 segmentation] for process isolation. AFAIU OpenBSD uses it for W^X (aka DEP) on i386. Linux may, too.
bjoli 7y ago
We have known for 15 years that speculative execution is a minefield. Intel seems to have placed a bet that this would never lead to any exploitable vulnerabilities. For what we know, AMD might have been more conservative. If anything the bet was crazy, regardless who is affected.
- simtel20 7y ago
  Or the bet is more subtle, that buyers are willing to eat the risk in exchange for higher perf, letting Intel still hold the title of higher performing chip and market that.

While it is no doubt true that there are likely some vulnerabilities in AMD's chips that don't exist in Intel's, it is also true that because Intel has a larger market share, that's where most of the work is going to be done to find vulnerabilities, by the bad guys as well as security researchers. Much like how Microsoft Windows used to have a lot more security problems than any other OS, because they had >90% market share, so no one bothered to develop malware for anything else. Monocultures invite epidemics.

sam0x17 7y ago
In this particular area though, it works both ways. Intel has so many researchers and resources, they are able to pursue tons of speculative execution / CPU doing something you wouldn't imagine it normally does experiments, and many of these find their way into their CPUs. A company with less resources might have less vulnerabilities of this nature simply because they don't have the resources to focus on that stuff in the first place. Just a theory.
alexozer 7y ago
I'm not exactly sure the monoculture argument is valid for Windows vs. Linux though; Linux still dominated server usage while Windows was attacked more often, despite the fact that you could potentially reap a much greater reward infecting a server. Unix-based OSs were just inherently more secure for the most part.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  While it's certainly true that Linux does much better on servers than laptop/desktops, I don't think it ever got to the >90% market share that Windows had on laptop/desktop (although admittedly that depends on whose estimates you look at). But servers certainly do differ in regards monoculture in important ways, relative to laptop/desktop. It's also possibly significant that Linux on servers is split between Redhat and Ubuntu and others, who have some non-trivial differences in regards to security updates, etc. None of which means that Unix-based OS's don't have inherent advantages in regards to security, just that not having a monoculture target on their forehead also helps.

zamadatix 7y ago

Still waiting on the AMD equivalent of Meltdown then?

throwaway2048 7y ago

What about when the intel equivalent that is 10000x worse and the whole universe explodes is made known and given an acronym?

cookiecaper 7y ago

AMD has fared better in the age of speculative execution attacks because they didn't allow their speculation to "cheat" and break hardware protection barriers, even though several of their major competitors did. While it's by no means a guarantee, it does say something about the engineering culture that they understood the theoretical risks of violating a protection barrier and chose to respect those boundaries, instead of dismissing the risk and going for the bigger stats. That deserves notice and approbation.

makomk 7y ago
Yeah, it really does seem like a fundamental difference in how AMD and Intel designed their processors. Researchers have found Intel processors allowing speculation to bypass hardware protection all over the place, and they just haven't found an AMD equivalent. Not only that, AMD have looked into this themselves and released an entire whitepaper explaining why this isn't possible: https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-whitepaper.pdf https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/security-whitepap... (With, interestingly, one exception. Apparently AMD CPUs allow speculative execution to ignore x86 segmentation. It's just that no-one cares because that's not used anymore. I'm not sure there have even been any mainstream OSes that used that for process isolation.) This is particularly bad for Intel because most of the SMT-based exploits can pretty much only be mitigated by disabling SMT entirely and taking such a substantial performance hit that they've been trying desperately to convince people not to.
- wahern 7y ago
  > I'm not sure there have even been any mainstream OSes that used [x86 segmentation] for process isolation. AFAIU OpenBSD uses it for W^X (aka DEP) on i386. Linux may, too.

bjoli 7y ago

We have known for 15 years that speculative execution is a minefield. Intel seems to have placed a bet that this would never lead to any exploitable vulnerabilities. For what we know, AMD might have been more conservative. If anything the bet was crazy, regardless who is affected.

simtel20 7y ago
Or the bet is more subtle, that buyers are willing to eat the risk in exchange for higher perf, letting Intel still hold the title of higher performing chip and market that.