AMD warns of new Meltdown, Spectre-like bugs affecting CPUs AMD is warning users of a newly discovered form of side-channel attack affecting a broad range of its chips that could lead to information disclosure. Akin to Meltdown and Spectre, the Transient Scheduler Attack (TSA) comprises four vulnerabilities that AMD said it discovered while looking into a Microsoft report about …
From all I read, this is a class of bugs that could happen on an Apple Mx chip as well, but I never saw this mentioned. What is the reason?
0. Doesn’t happen on M1-M4
1. Nobody ever tried.
2 Apple doesn’t care.
3. Apple has the same costly workarounds but doesn’t tell anyone.
4. By design or luck the workarounds are cheaper, say 4% instead of 20%.
5. The OS runs critical software on one fully protected core, or one an efficiency core, and as long as you use the OS code you are safe.
I’d bet on 0. or more likely 5., especially since the low power cores should be safe, and you should be able to use up to six of them.
Surely it is 1A: nobody ever tried, as this is a new public release of information about specific techniques. Whether Apple (or Intel, or any other CPU manufacturer) will try it on their own hardware is up to them. 3rd party security researchers may do so as well. In cases like this it is definitely not as simple as 'compile and test'; one must thoroughly understand the target CPU design in order to create attacks based on the same concept, but targeted to the actual facilities at hand.
This class of bugs does include some kinds of Apple Silicon core, but as in all cases it varies from core to core, regardless of instruction set.
Well, most of the cpu issues found recently are mostly problematic for cloud operators and even then only if you share the servers between clients (which is often).
As for running random stuff on the desktop, yeah, that happens all the time (one has to install stuff to work or play or wtv).
These days as long i'm not part of a botnet I don't know what is the difference between having my data at third parties because i use google/apple/ms services or bad operators...
It sounds like this requires concurrent operations to happen, and the extraction rate is low. That would be with a native app can be tuned to match a specific CPU's internal timing. WebAssembly is not so precise and it may effectively drop the extraction rate to zero.
At this point I'm thinking that attack detection is becoming increasingly valuable. Mitigations always have a cost. Even a flawless CPU is paying a little performance penalty from the factory to prevent attacks.
"So, bad news for any cloud providers out there then, whose line of business is literally letting third parties run arbitrary code on their machines."
Assuming you're referring to VMs on cloud providers then no, third parties are *not* running arbitrary code (directly) on the cloud providers (physical) machines - VM hypervisors (selected by the cloud providers) are running on the cloud provider's physical machines and then 3rd party OSes (i.e. Linux distros) are running inside VMs managed by those hypervisors rather than (directly) on the physical machines.
Or if the manufacturer cared enough to still support it past five years. (*cough*SONY*WHEEZE*)
(Had a laptop that was pretty damn good for it being a 2002 vintage model- it ran XP without any complaint, the onboard graphics were actually decent enough to do some gaming, and it ticked every box I had at the time. fast forward three-four years, to find that there was a bug in the display driver that caused hard locks, but the drivers from manufacturer of the GPU didn't recognize it because the laptop's OEM (Sony) had a custom BIOS for the GPU; They never provided a single driver update in the 5 odd years that had elapsed between introducing that model to when I discovered this issue. Shame, too, as it was a damned solid machine at the time that was supremely easy to work on, had hot-swappable drive modules, and the option for a second battery which gave it a ridiculous amount of run time for the day.
Decades ago a BIOS flash was pretty tricky, and if you pooched it it bricked your computer. Then, they went to a 'dual BIOS,' where you flashed a 'backup' then overwrote the main if all went well. Haven't done a BIOS flash in a loooong time; glad to hear it's a smoother operation now.
Your laptop maker may push a BIOS update, but even if they don't, processor microcode can be updated by the OS during boot (i.e. on every single boot, the OS should check the processor microcode, and if necessary, will update the microcode. This is not a permanent update, so it happens on every boot.)
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