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Scientists find security risk in RISC-V open-source chip architecture
- schoen 2y agoIt's astonishing how few technical details are provided in this article (like the nature of the vulnerability, whether it affects RISC-V's design in general or only a specific implementation, and whether it is readily fixable). I tried to find more details and found that slashdot user st0nerhat had found a more technical summary in Chinese, which you can see translated here: https://mp-weixin-qq-com.translate.goog/s/ke8tBpJ7NpvUEAecov--UQ?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://mp-weixin-qq-com.translate.goog/s/ke8tBpJ7NpvUEAecov...
- Taniwha 2y agoThe article has little useful data - this looks like it's the original paper: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ke8tBpJ7NpvUEAecov--UQ https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ke8tBpJ7NpvUEAecov--UQ
- Taniwha 2y agoThis describes a timing attack like Spectre/Meltdown on a particular O/S architecture, not all RISC-V cores - looks like there are timing issues with allocation of write port slots when writing to the register file - because division takes so long it's possible to use a late write from division to tell whether a particular speculative branch has been taken or not
- snvzz 2y agoThere's a CVE table in that article and they seem to have CVEs from a microarchitecture implementing openRISC (entirely different ISA) mixed in there somehow.
- snvzz 2y agodupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40591280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40591280 This is a bug in a student-built microarchitecture, not an issue with the ISA. Not a great article, as it attacks RISC-V for no good reason.
- Taniwha 2y agoYeah looks like bugs in riscv-boom rather than the RISC-V ISA itself
- Taniwha 2y agoIn particular this is a timing attack like Spectre/Meltdown - looks like there are timing issues with allocation of write port slots when writing to the register file - because division takes so long it's possible to use a late write from division to tell whether a particular speculative branch has been taken or not
- longerd2 2y agoThey had a pun, they wanted to use it.
- snvzz 2y agoRelated discussion on Reddit[0]. 0. https://old.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1d936eb/presumably_this_vaporscare_nonsense_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1d936eb/presumably_t...