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More Meltdown/Spectre exploits on the horizon--will Intel bug bounties save us?
- Thread starter Austinian
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S
SushiEater
Guest
Personally I think Intel and MS and Bill Gates should announced the bounty on hackers heads. Then have secret militia to go after them and exterminate them like cockroaches.
I think in the long run it would cost much less than to look for the bugs, pay restitution and bounties, pay lawyers etc...... Just eliminate all hackers and be done with.
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Not practical, I fear. Too many hacker groups are protected/sponsored by various nations that use them for cyberwarfare.
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SushiEater
Guest
Unless these hackers housed in a secure facility they are very approachable. If there is a will there is a way. Besides, if some are get eliminated the rest will run.
M
malch
Guest
Oh good grief. If hardware Ring 0 protection is this vulnerable, we're all really screwed.
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For me, the core news was this:
"Given our observations with mfence and lfence successfully mitigating Spectre and SpectrePrime in our experiments, we believe that any software techniques that mitigate Meltdown and Spectre will also be sufficient to mitigate MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime," the paper concluded. "On the other hand, we believe that microarchitectural mitigation of our Prime variants will require new considerations."
As I interpret this, our current chips may well be OK from a security POV if we're willing to accept the performance hit from software/microcode patches, but a permanent hardware fix that restores our previous full, unpatched CPU performance may not exist.
Yes? No?
Is there a radically new architecture with equal or better performance on the horizon?
I wish I knew.
M
malch
Guest
It all sounds pretty darn soft to me given we're talking about the most fundamental hardware security underpinnings. I also very much doubt this is the last exploit of speculative execution.
Our entire computing infrastructure is currently sitting on very shaky foundations.
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I'm not quite that pessimistic. Unless it turns out there's a remotely exploitable security hole that can't be patched (or not patched without a really severe performance hit), I think our individual PCs will go on much as they have since the Meltdown/Spectre patches went public.
But we may not continue to have even the modest CPU performance increases of recent years if these new exploits do prove to be unfixable in hardware. That is a sad, but not disastrous, situation.
Being a 'glass-half-empty' kinda guy it sounds pretty dire to me. In fact I'm starting to think, not only is there no glass - there never really was one. ;-)
With all that's coming out about this I'm getting the feeling that the wheels are about to come off the whole thing - meaning that we're going to continue finding ways to eliminate any semblance of online security with our current hardware/software configurations. At some point (soon) the Swiss cheese architecture is going to lose integrity and will no longer be pluggable.
Given the accelerating rise of AI, combined with the development of quantum computing, it has to happen. How else could it be really? It's becoming increasingly obvious x86 always had to die and hindsight tells us it probably should have been axed 20-some years ago.
It wouldn't surprise me if we had to start over, completely from scratch in a whole new direction, much sooner than any of us expect. Pencil and paper anyone?
The other option is to increasingly let AI do most of the 'patch'-work for us - then we have competing AI's, order vs chaos, good vs evil, etc. but some AI is already communicating with itself in language we don't understand, at speeds we can't comprehend. That's where it gets scary and that
Nice knowin' ya. ;-)
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I login, and innocently view this forum, only to find myself in the middle of the computing apocalypse! Thanks a lot.
:-D
M
malch
Guest
He has a point. With Meltdown and Spectre it took us decades to discover a profoundly fundamental flaw. If we make a similar mistake with the AI systems that are going to be developed over the coming years, the consequences could be quite catastrophic.
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I'm not saying he's wrong, just depressing. Like much of what we call reality nowadays. :-(
If I get left behind in the Singularity rapture, Plan B is to don a furry dog suit and hope to be adopted as a cute pet. ;-)
was this tongue in cheek, or are you really proposing that Wintel goes to war against China and Soviet Russia?
M
malch
Guest
It really is. I'm not so worried for myself since my time here is limited. But I sure worry for my kids :-(
But it's not all gloom and doom. I filed my taxes today and have some juicy refunds coming my way
Just call me 'Sunshine' ;-)
S
SushiEater
Guest
Yes, Skynet will take over and send robots from the future to your house. Maybe in the form of Terminator or Dalek.
S
SushiEater
Guest
If you are worried for your kids you need to do what was done in the "Blast from the past"
Yes it is.
F
fotografffic
Guest
Innocently? :-D
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