NEWS Massive Intel Hardware Bug

tl;dr: There is evidence of a massive Intel CPU hardware bug (currently under embargo) that directly affects big cloud providers like Amazon and Google. The fix will introduce notable performance penalties on Intel machines (30-35%).

People have noticed a recent development in the Linux kernel: a rather massive, important redesign (page table isolation) is being introduced very fast for kernel standards... and being backported! The "official" reason is to incorporate a mitigation called KASLR... which most security experts consider almost useless. There's also some unusual, suspicious stuff going on: the documentation is missing, some of the comments are redacted () and people with Intel, Amazon and Google emails are CC'd.

According to one of the people working on it, PTI is only needed for Intel CPUs, AMD is not affected by whatever it protects against (https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2). PTI affects a core low-level feature (virtual memory) and has severe performance penalties: 29% for an i7-6700 and 34% for an i7-3770S, according to Brad Spengler from grsecurity. PTI is simply not active for AMD CPUs. The kernel flag is named X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE and its description is "CPU is insecure and needs kernel page table isolation".

Microsoft has been silently working on a similar feature since November:

People are speculating on a possible massive Intel CPU hardware bug that directly opens up serious vulnerabilities on big cloud providers which offer shared hosting (several VMs on a single host), for example by letting a VM read from or write to another one.

Summary article: (a bit outdated, follow @grsecurity, @scarybeasts and others on Twitter for up-to-date info)

This is going to make headlines and will probably be the worst hardware bug in years.

 

tl;dr intel bois be fucked. possible 30-35% performance loss. ;-;7

 

****

 

basically.

 

Not to mention, Intel's literally my GPU right now.



endit

 

I mean if you only visit a few trusted sites and don't generally install more than what you have, chances are you could be fine without a patch.

 

Hopefully, anyway.

Still kinda worrying though.

Don't really wanna stick with Intel as my GPU though, tbh.

 

Definitely is. You would want the fix, don't see how one down the line won't resolve performance issues though/

Nobody does.

 

maybe one day it'll get to that point