10 ms·

Brilliant approach, really. Never occurred to me to try something like this! Are you affected? Very likely. What can you do about it? Nerf your CPU performance

Brilliant approach, really. Never occurred to me to try something like this! Are you affected? Very likely. What can you do about it? Nerf your CPU performance by disabling "turbo boost" or equivalent. Should you do it? Probably not unless you're particularly vulnerable (journalist, human rights activist, etc.) One thing I found interesting that may get changed later, so I'm documenting it here, is in their FAQ they say: > Why did Intel ask for a long embargo, considering they are not deploying patches? > > Ask Intel. So Intel did ask for a long embargo, then apparently did nothing about it. My guess is they investigated "can we actually mitigate this thing with a microcode update?" and arrived at the conclusion after actually trying - or possibly after external influences were exerted (you be the judge) - that no, there's not much you can really do about this one. Later in the document another FAQ says: > [...] Both Cloudflare and Microsoft deployed the mitigation suggested by De Feo et al. (who, while our paper was under the long Intel embargo, independently re-discovered how to exploit anomalous 0s in SIKE for power side channels). [...] Which is again telling us that there indeed WAS a long embargo placed on this research by Intel. Only mentioning this here just in case the PR spin doctors threaten the researchers into removing mention of Intel on this one. Which honestly I hope doesn't happen because my interpretation is that Intel asked for that long embargo so they could investigate really fixing the problem (state agencies have more methods at their disposal and wouldn't need much time to exert influence over Intel if they decided to). Which speaks well of them IMO. But then again, not everybody's going to come to that same conclusion which is why I'm slightly concerned those facts may get memory-holed.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
You can configure your CPU to always boost if you're really paranoid. It shouldn't run much hotter since the load doesn't increase, just the frequency.
- zx8080 4y ago
  Tell that to my intel macbook. Seriously, using a popular Turbo Boost Switcher makes it a lot colder and live longer on a battery
- throwaway742 4y ago
  Then why isn't that the default setting?
  - smaudet 4y ago
    I wonder if this is such a widespread issue - frequency attacks mean the cpu must actually change speed frequently in order for any attack to occur. For a laptop how I thought it worked was cpu frequently was constant depending on performance level - so cpu should shift from low to high depending on idle state... For a server trying to aggressively save power, frequently changing speed per operation could leak this information. Turbo boost I thought was a setting overlong periods of time to change power levels, if you change too frequently you don't actually save much power.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    I didn't say temps or power won't rise, just that it's not a huge hit.
api 4y ago
> What can you do about it? Nerf your CPU performance by disabling "turbo boost" or equivalent. Should you do it? Probably not unless you're particularly vulnerable (journalist, human rights activist, etc.) The most likely to be targeted (and probably easiest to target) systems are probably cloud hosts. This might be an argument for disabling frequency scaling and fixing clock speed on cloud VM hosts or bare metal servers. Less of a performance hit there too since those tend to run at a sustained max anyway, and turbo boost can be problematic in those environments due to heat. It can reduce overall throughput in a sustained load scenario.
- gpm 4y ago
  > since those tend to run at a sustained max anyway Really? I've never been on the cloud-provider side of cloud computing, but every application I've developed that ran on the cloud was rarely if ever running at a sustained maximum of the resources allocated to it. We always wanted a buffer to be able to absorb load spikes and users performing unusually expensive actions.
  - staindk 4y ago
    I think this means you were paying for the over-provisioning i.e. paying for a full CPU or baremetal server? "The Cloud" is all about vCPU - "2 vCPUs" feels somewhat standard for a base-tier VPS... and 2 vCPUs means "2 virtual CPUs" or rather "roughly equivalent to 2 CPU cores" I think. I understand that jargon to mean they are always cramming 11 x 2vCPU clients onto 20 physical cores.
    - ceeplusplus 4y ago
      No, 2 vCPUs is 2 logical threads, which is equivalent to a single physical core on x86. So yeah, they are cramming 11 x 2 vCPUs onto 20 physical cores. In fact, it's more like 20 x 2 vCPUs.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      Depends on the cloud - OVH and Digital Ocean yes, but AWS give you whole uncontested cores ( bar the t* instance line, but that's it's whole thing).
mackmgg 4y ago
I've always turned off Turbo Boost on my Intel laptops anyway, because of the heat/battery hit. If I was doing something that I really wanted the extra speed and I was plugged in, I would turn it back on for that task, but I never really felt I was missing anything by having it off. Considering how easy it is to turn on/off (on macOS at least I used Turbo Boost Switcher which added a button in the menu bar to toggle it) I don't think you would have a noticeable performance hit by keeping it off except when you need it.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Turbo Boost is not something you can reliably kick in any load spike due to its operation being constrained by the thread and thermal load of the CPU. Also, it's affected by the CPU instructions you're already running. AVX family is esp. power-heavy and thermal-heavy.
xoa 4y ago
>What can you do about it? Nerf your CPU performance by disabling "turbo boost" or equivalent. Eh? Doesn't this require an attacker to actually be able to talk to the targeted system? You mention classes of actor ("journalist, human rights activist, etc") that aren't online public service providers or at least perhaps shouldn't be. Private devices connecting out to the greater net are effectively universally behind firewalls and often (CG)NAT as well and not unilaterally addressable the other direction. For private services, access should be exclusively via VPN (direct WG or mesh like nebula or something) with PSK alongside public keys and perhaps something like port knocking in front as well. Same as with other hot class side channel attacks, the attacker does in fact need to be able to get the targeted system to run something somehow. So the most basic thing to do about it is simply not allow attackers to do that. The players for whom this is fundamentally impossible are general public online service providers, but that isn't the class most people or businesses fall into. If attackers are getting sensitive servers to respond to arbitrary code then they have already gotten access credentials of some kind.
- BoppreH 4y ago
  > the attacker does in fact need to be able to get the targeted system to run something somehow Unfortunately that includes Javascript, and now that affects virtually everybody. Speculation: if you can find a Javascript call that uses protected keys, you might be able to extract secrets from that route.
  - bobkazamakis 4y ago
    > the attacker does in fact need to be able to get the targeted system to run something somehow >Unfortunately that includes Javascript, and now that affects virtually everybody. Debatable -- not because of the goofballs who insist on never running javascript, but because it doesn't have the necessary clock precision available.
    - _0w8t 4y ago
      When Spectre came it turned out that it was very straightforward to implement the relevant attacks in JS. A script can use workers with shared memory access to monitor execution and get a timer with less than 100ns resolution. As the result the shared memory were disabled. Later under the presumption that relevant issues were mitigated, the shared memory was re-enabled again. So I wonder if the shared memory will be disabled again as it may allow to monitor frequency changes.
yunohn 4y ago
> > Why did Intel ask for a long embargo, considering they are not deploying patches? > > Ask Intel. Indeed, I really found this unnecessarily snarky on their part. I don’t think Intel was acting in bad faith. In my experience, security researchers are very /particular/. They like telling everyone that no matter what you do, you are vulnerable for umpteen reasons, whether practical or not.
- AlexCoventry 4y ago
  If they didn't tell you about the risks and you got hacked, you'd also be asking why.
bayindirh 4y ago
> What can you do about it? Nerf your CPU performance by disabling "turbo boost" or equivalent. A server running a multithreaded load is probably disabling turbo boost anyway because of the thermal load on the package already. Instead, you should disable speedstep and set your systems to maximum performance. However, this will increase the heat and your power bill considerably.
- mcronce 4y ago
  I was thinking about busy servers running mixed workloads. I would think that, with the CPU running a bunch of workloads on different cores, context switching, etc, it wouldn't be a practical attack. Maybe that's incorrect. Mostly idle servers are a different story, obviously.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Sometimes response critical VMs are pinned to the cores at the hypervisor level, and intel's chips support independent (frequency) scaling of CPU cores for some time. In that scenario, mixed loads won't help. You'll have at least one pinned core, and it can scale relative to the VMs load (considering you also pin hypervisor cores, etc). So, it's possible to hit that pinned core and execute the same timing attack. I know it's a niche scenario, but it's not an impossible or implausible one. Another possibility is the servers which fill critical roles, but they're idle or in a constant low-load state to have headspace for high loads. Again, attacking these servers are plausible. Considering these servers are not open to internet most of the time, we're bordering on corporate espionage, but it's not the subject here.
    - sterlind 4y ago
      unless you do something special, a lot of interrupts are handled by CPU 0. there's techniques like Receive-Side Scaling to balance this load across the cores but that's specific to NICs.
      - bayindirh 4y ago
Melatonic 4y ago
Is that all you need to do? Because many overclockers permanently disable Turbo boost anyways so that they can run a higher clock ratio all the time (cant have turbo occidentally crashing your system once you have really overclocked it a lot). This does not of course disable the low power states for idle or low low load. I probably have Turbo disabled right now!
hsuduebc2 4y ago
I'm not getting the part how disabling turbo boost lowers your cpu performance. It should only significantly increase power consumption right?
- STRML 4y ago
  Turbo will move the processor above the rated TDP when there is thermal headroom to do so. Turning it off means you'll max out at the rated TDP. Now, TDP used to mean the max power of the chip, but as Intel's process failures left them holding the bag with no significant performance updates to speak of, they started overclocking their chips more and more so they could claim that the new gen was faster than the last. Try turning off Turbo Boost on a 2020 i9 Macbook Pro - you actually get a usable machine with reasonable battery life with it off, instead of the hot toaster with 2hr battery life that Intel gave you. But it'll max at something like 2.2GHz when you paid for just over 4.
  - hsuduebc2 4y ago
    Wow. How to they get their score in benchmarks? You can't "temporarily overclock" your cpu for too long right?
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      You can keep it up if everything can handle the current and heat. A typical Intel chip on default behavior will go to maximum boost, limited by watts, for about half a minute. Then it will drop to a lower number of watts. Note that base clock gets ignored here; in this mode the base clock is just a minimum promise. Many desktop motherboards easily or even automatically remove the time limit.
    - STRML 4y ago
      Correct. This makes benchmarks, at least on thermally limited machines like laptops, very unreliable. High-quality review sites like notebookcheck spend a lot of time dealing with this by doing prolonged benchmarks and measuring thermals. And there's an honest question to ask: how do you use your computer? If you're just browsing the web 95% of the time and occasionally opening Word/Excel, then short bursts of high power when you need it is perfect. But if you run longer tasks like many programmers or artists do, these machines simply fall down in sustained use. This is one reason why the M1/M2 architecture has been such a revelation for professionals who primarily work on laptops. It can run full-bore for hours, because the lower-end chips (which are faster than any Intel released at the time) barely hit 10W at max load.
Terretta 4y ago
> So Intel *did* ask for a long embargo… > … again telling us that there indeed WAS a long embargo placed on this research by Intel. These are worded as if this wasn’t clear? No guesswork, the article states it plainly: ”We disclosed our findings, together with proof-of-concept code, to Intel, Cloudflare and Microsoft in Q3 2021 and to AMD in Q1 2022. Intel originally requested our findings be held under embargo until May 10, 2022. Later, Intel requested a significant extension of that embargo, and we coordinated with them on publicly disclosing our findings on June 14, 2022.”
- synctext 4y ago
  The scientific article URL is broken, see correct link: https://github.com/FPSG-UIUC/hertzbleed/pull/4 https://github.com/FPSG-UIUC/hertzbleed/pull/4 19 pages of detail, "Hertzbleed: Turning Power Side-Channel Attacks Into Remote Timing Attacks on x86 (USENIX 2022)"
- gralx 4y ago
  You missed this part: > Only mentioning this here just in case the PR spin doctors threaten the researchers into removing mention of Intel on this one.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    I didn't.... Continue the quote: > Only mentioning this here just in case the PR spin doctors threaten the researchers into removing mention of Intel on this one. Which honestly I hope doesn't happen because my interpretation is that Intel asked for that long embargo... Key part of that closing paragraph: > ... my interpretation is that Intel asked for that long embargo ... and ... not everybody's going to come to that same conclusion... If mentioning here to mitigate spin doctoring, the important thing to record in case Intel made them remove it would be the explicitly not open to interpretation paragraph I cited above.
mr_toad 4y ago
> Are you affected? Very likely. How long is it likely to take to apply this to cryptographic protocols that people actually use? The protocol they attacked is rather obscure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersingular_isogeny_key_exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersingular_isogeny_key_exch...
- willbudd 4y ago
  To demonstrate the effectiveness of the attack they deliberately chose SIKE as a protocol that was thought to be very resilient against side channel shenanigans. If anything, real-world contexts are likely to be lower hanging fruit.
hulitu 4y ago
> So Intel did ask for a long embargo, then apparently did nothing about it. It was not for them but for their 3 letter customers. 0 day unpatched for 1 year, what can be better than that ?
- Proven 4y ago
  Doesn't make any sense - there's no benefit to Intel (why would anyone order more CPUs?) and there's much more downside from all other customers.
  - taneq 4y ago
    Revolving door? Or even just someone looking to retire or otherwise cash out son who didn’t want the stock price to drop yet?
  - cestith 4y ago
    It gives certain customers time to mitigate - and certain others time to exploit - the issue before the embargo is lifted. It maintains the customer/vendor relationship. It also allows Intel, even if current products are still impacted, a head start on R&D for future products before disclosure. Remember Intel also has their own Linux, has their own compiler suite, and directly supports development of Linux and Windows (and probably macOS for Apple) for their industry partners. So they could have been working on figuring out software mitigations during that time which they can now share.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

You can configure your CPU to always boost if you're really paranoid. It shouldn't run much hotter since the load doesn't increase, just the frequency.

zx8080 4y ago
Tell that to my intel macbook. Seriously, using a popular Turbo Boost Switcher makes it a lot colder and live longer on a battery
throwaway742 4y ago
Then why isn't that the default setting?
- smaudet 4y ago
  I wonder if this is such a widespread issue - frequency attacks mean the cpu must actually change speed frequently in order for any attack to occur. For a laptop how I thought it worked was cpu frequently was constant depending on performance level - so cpu should shift from low to high depending on idle state... For a server trying to aggressively save power, frequently changing speed per operation could leak this information. Turbo boost I thought was a setting overlong periods of time to change power levels, if you change too frequently you don't actually save much power.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I didn't say temps or power won't rise, just that it's not a huge hit.

api 4y ago

> What can you do about it? Nerf your CPU performance by disabling "turbo boost" or equivalent. Should you do it? Probably not unless you're particularly vulnerable (journalist, human rights activist, etc.) The most likely to be targeted (and probably easiest to target) systems are probably cloud hosts. This might be an argument for disabling frequency scaling and fixing clock speed on cloud VM hosts or bare metal servers. Less of a performance hit there too since those tend to run at a sustained max anyway, and turbo boost can be problematic in those environments due to heat. It can reduce overall throughput in a sustained load scenario.

gpm 4y ago
> since those tend to run at a sustained max anyway Really? I've never been on the cloud-provider side of cloud computing, but every application I've developed that ran on the cloud was rarely if ever running at a sustained maximum of the resources allocated to it. We always wanted a buffer to be able to absorb load spikes and users performing unusually expensive actions.
- staindk 4y ago
  I think this means you were paying for the over-provisioning i.e. paying for a full CPU or baremetal server? "The Cloud" is all about vCPU - "2 vCPUs" feels somewhat standard for a base-tier VPS... and 2 vCPUs means "2 virtual CPUs" or rather "roughly equivalent to 2 CPU cores" I think. I understand that jargon to mean they are always cramming 11 x 2vCPU clients onto 20 physical cores.
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    No, 2 vCPUs is 2 logical threads, which is equivalent to a single physical core on x86. So yeah, they are cramming 11 x 2 vCPUs onto 20 physical cores. In fact, it's more like 20 x 2 vCPUs.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Depends on the cloud - OVH and Digital Ocean yes, but AWS give you whole uncontested cores ( bar the t* instance line, but that's it's whole thing).

mackmgg 4y ago

I've always turned off Turbo Boost on my Intel laptops anyway, because of the heat/battery hit. If I was doing something that I really wanted the extra speed and I was plugged in, I would turn it back on for that task, but I never really felt I was missing anything by having it off. Considering how easy it is to turn on/off (on macOS at least I used Turbo Boost Switcher which added a button in the menu bar to toggle it) I don't think you would have a noticeable performance hit by keeping it off except when you need it.

bayindirh 4y ago
Turbo Boost is not something you can reliably kick in any load spike due to its operation being constrained by the thread and thermal load of the CPU. Also, it's affected by the CPU instructions you're already running. AVX family is esp. power-heavy and thermal-heavy.

xoa 4y ago

>What can you do about it? Nerf your CPU performance by disabling "turbo boost" or equivalent. Eh? Doesn't this require an attacker to actually be able to talk to the targeted system? You mention classes of actor ("journalist, human rights activist, etc") that aren't online public service providers or at least perhaps shouldn't be. Private devices connecting out to the greater net are effectively universally behind firewalls and often (CG)NAT as well and not unilaterally addressable the other direction. For private services, access should be exclusively via VPN (direct WG or mesh like nebula or something) with PSK alongside public keys and perhaps something like port knocking in front as well. Same as with other hot class side channel attacks, the attacker does in fact need to be able to get the targeted system to run something somehow. So the most basic thing to do about it is simply not allow attackers to do that. The players for whom this is fundamentally impossible are general public online service providers, but that isn't the class most people or businesses fall into. If attackers are getting sensitive servers to respond to arbitrary code then they have already gotten access credentials of some kind.

BoppreH 4y ago
> the attacker does in fact need to be able to get the targeted system to run something somehow Unfortunately that includes Javascript, and now that affects virtually everybody. Speculation: if you can find a Javascript call that uses protected keys, you might be able to extract secrets from that route.
- bobkazamakis 4y ago
  > the attacker does in fact need to be able to get the targeted system to run something somehow >Unfortunately that includes Javascript, and now that affects virtually everybody. Debatable -- not because of the goofballs who insist on never running javascript, but because it doesn't have the necessary clock precision available.
  - _0w8t 4y ago
    When Spectre came it turned out that it was very straightforward to implement the relevant attacks in JS. A script can use workers with shared memory access to monitor execution and get a timer with less than 100ns resolution. As the result the shared memory were disabled. Later under the presumption that relevant issues were mitigated, the shared memory was re-enabled again. So I wonder if the shared memory will be disabled again as it may allow to monitor frequency changes.

yunohn 4y ago

> > Why did Intel ask for a long embargo, considering they are not deploying patches? > > Ask Intel. Indeed, I really found this unnecessarily snarky on their part. I don’t think Intel was acting in bad faith. In my experience, security researchers are very /particular/. They like telling everyone that no matter what you do, you are vulnerable for umpteen reasons, whether practical or not.

AlexCoventry 4y ago
If they didn't tell you about the risks and you got hacked, you'd also be asking why.

bayindirh 4y ago

> What can you do about it? Nerf your CPU performance by disabling "turbo boost" or equivalent. A server running a multithreaded load is probably disabling turbo boost anyway because of the thermal load on the package already. Instead, you should disable speedstep and set your systems to maximum performance. However, this will increase the heat and your power bill considerably.

mcronce 4y ago
I was thinking about busy servers running mixed workloads. I would think that, with the CPU running a bunch of workloads on different cores, context switching, etc, it wouldn't be a practical attack. Maybe that's incorrect. Mostly idle servers are a different story, obviously.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Sometimes response critical VMs are pinned to the cores at the hypervisor level, and intel's chips support independent (frequency) scaling of CPU cores for some time. In that scenario, mixed loads won't help. You'll have at least one pinned core, and it can scale relative to the VMs load (considering you also pin hypervisor cores, etc). So, it's possible to hit that pinned core and execute the same timing attack. I know it's a niche scenario, but it's not an impossible or implausible one. Another possibility is the servers which fill critical roles, but they're idle or in a constant low-load state to have headspace for high loads. Again, attacking these servers are plausible. Considering these servers are not open to internet most of the time, we're bordering on corporate espionage, but it's not the subject here.
  - sterlind 4y ago
    unless you do something special, a lot of interrupts are handled by CPU 0. there's techniques like Receive-Side Scaling to balance this load across the cores but that's specific to NICs.
    - bayindirh 4y ago

Melatonic 4y ago

Is that all you need to do? Because many overclockers permanently disable Turbo boost anyways so that they can run a higher clock ratio all the time (cant have turbo occidentally crashing your system once you have really overclocked it a lot). This does not of course disable the low power states for idle or low low load. I probably have Turbo disabled right now!

hsuduebc2 4y ago

I'm not getting the part how disabling turbo boost lowers your cpu performance. It should only significantly increase power consumption right?

STRML 4y ago
Turbo will move the processor above the rated TDP when there is thermal headroom to do so. Turning it off means you'll max out at the rated TDP. Now, TDP used to mean the max power of the chip, but as Intel's process failures left them holding the bag with no significant performance updates to speak of, they started overclocking their chips more and more so they could claim that the new gen was faster than the last. Try turning off Turbo Boost on a 2020 i9 Macbook Pro - you actually get a usable machine with reasonable battery life with it off, instead of the hot toaster with 2hr battery life that Intel gave you. But it'll max at something like 2.2GHz when you paid for just over 4.
- hsuduebc2 4y ago
  Wow. How to they get their score in benchmarks? You can't "temporarily overclock" your cpu for too long right?
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    You can keep it up if everything can handle the current and heat. A typical Intel chip on default behavior will go to maximum boost, limited by watts, for about half a minute. Then it will drop to a lower number of watts. Note that base clock gets ignored here; in this mode the base clock is just a minimum promise. Many desktop motherboards easily or even automatically remove the time limit.
  - STRML 4y ago
    Correct. This makes benchmarks, at least on thermally limited machines like laptops, very unreliable. High-quality review sites like notebookcheck spend a lot of time dealing with this by doing prolonged benchmarks and measuring thermals. And there's an honest question to ask: how do you use your computer? If you're just browsing the web 95% of the time and occasionally opening Word/Excel, then short bursts of high power when you need it is perfect. But if you run longer tasks like many programmers or artists do, these machines simply fall down in sustained use. This is one reason why the M1/M2 architecture has been such a revelation for professionals who primarily work on laptops. It can run full-bore for hours, because the lower-end chips (which are faster than any Intel released at the time) barely hit 10W at max load.

Terretta 4y ago

> So Intel *did* ask for a long embargo… > … again telling us that there indeed WAS a long embargo placed on this research by Intel. These are worded as if this wasn’t clear? No guesswork, the article states it plainly: ”We disclosed our findings, together with proof-of-concept code, to Intel, Cloudflare and Microsoft in Q3 2021 and to AMD in Q1 2022. Intel originally requested our findings be held under embargo until May 10, 2022. Later, Intel requested a significant extension of that embargo, and we coordinated with them on publicly disclosing our findings on June 14, 2022.”

synctext 4y ago
The scientific article URL is broken, see correct link: https://github.com/FPSG-UIUC/hertzbleed/pull/4 https://github.com/FPSG-UIUC/hertzbleed/pull/4 19 pages of detail, "Hertzbleed: Turning Power Side-Channel Attacks Into Remote Timing Attacks on x86 (USENIX 2022)"
gralx 4y ago
You missed this part: > Only mentioning this here just in case the PR spin doctors threaten the researchers into removing mention of Intel on this one.
- Terretta 4y ago
  I didn't.... Continue the quote: > Only mentioning this here just in case the PR spin doctors threaten the researchers into removing mention of Intel on this one. Which honestly I hope doesn't happen because my interpretation is that Intel asked for that long embargo... Key part of that closing paragraph: > ... my interpretation is that Intel asked for that long embargo ... and ... not everybody's going to come to that same conclusion... If mentioning here to mitigate spin doctoring, the important thing to record in case Intel made them remove it would be the explicitly not open to interpretation paragraph I cited above.

mr_toad 4y ago

> Are you affected? Very likely. How long is it likely to take to apply this to cryptographic protocols that people actually use? The protocol they attacked is rather obscure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersingular_isogeny_key_exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersingular_isogeny_key_exch...

willbudd 4y ago
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the attack they deliberately chose SIKE as a protocol that was thought to be very resilient against side channel shenanigans. If anything, real-world contexts are likely to be lower hanging fruit.

hulitu 4y ago

> So Intel did ask for a long embargo, then apparently did nothing about it. It was not for them but for their 3 letter customers. 0 day unpatched for 1 year, what can be better than that ?

Proven 4y ago
Doesn't make any sense - there's no benefit to Intel (why would anyone order more CPUs?) and there's much more downside from all other customers.
- taneq 4y ago
  Revolving door? Or even just someone looking to retire or otherwise cash out son who didn’t want the stock price to drop yet?
- cestith 4y ago
  It gives certain customers time to mitigate - and certain others time to exploit - the issue before the embargo is lifted. It maintains the customer/vendor relationship. It also allows Intel, even if current products are still impacted, a head start on R&D for future products before disclosure. Remember Intel also has their own Linux, has their own compiler suite, and directly supports development of Linux and Windows (and probably macOS for Apple) for their industry partners. So they could have been working on figuring out software mitigations during that time which they can now share.