- Nov 5, 2011
- 5,855
You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen
theregister.co.uk: You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen
Strap yourself in, this ride won't be over for a long time yet
By Trevor Pott 29 Jan 2018 at 10:02
spectreglass sharpen saturated - theregister.co.uk 400x400.jpg
The Spectre processor design vulnerability is here to stay. Even if you choose to ignore it, the problem still exists. This is potentially a very bad thing for public cloud vendors. It may end up being great for chip manufacturers. It's fantastic for VMware.
Existing patches can fix Meltdown, but only seem to be able to mitigate Spectre, not fix it. By many accounts, we'll be playing whack-the-vulnerability with Spectre until at least the next generation of silicon.
The definitive paper on Spectre says: "While makeshift processor-specific countermeasures are possible in some cases, sound solutions will require fixes to processor designs as well as updates to instruction set architectures (ISAs) to give hardware architects and software developers a common understanding as to what computation state CPU implementations are (and are not) permitted to leak."
A number of security experts I have spoken to confirm that the Spectre problem has not gone away, nor is it going to any time soon. There is some concern, however, about the messaging that is emerging around this vulnerability.
A great many individuals – not only those who work for Intel – have been putting a lot of time recently into telling everyone that we should calm down, not worry about Spectre, and simply continue with business as usual. There are patches, they say, and even if those patches cause problems now, that will be addressed soon.
It's not quite that simple, and Spectre may ultimately change computing forever. In the short term, it means a lot of pain for some pretty big companies. ...
... We must now assume that everything is compromised. Even the CPUs upon which our workloads run.
... read comments on the website...
theregister.co.uk: You can't ignore Spectre. Look, it's pressing its nose against your screen
Strap yourself in, this ride won't be over for a long time yet
By Trevor Pott 29 Jan 2018 at 10:02
spectreglass sharpen saturated - theregister.co.uk 400x400.jpg
The Spectre processor design vulnerability is here to stay. Even if you choose to ignore it, the problem still exists. This is potentially a very bad thing for public cloud vendors. It may end up being great for chip manufacturers. It's fantastic for VMware.
Existing patches can fix Meltdown, but only seem to be able to mitigate Spectre, not fix it. By many accounts, we'll be playing whack-the-vulnerability with Spectre until at least the next generation of silicon.
The definitive paper on Spectre says: "While makeshift processor-specific countermeasures are possible in some cases, sound solutions will require fixes to processor designs as well as updates to instruction set architectures (ISAs) to give hardware architects and software developers a common understanding as to what computation state CPU implementations are (and are not) permitted to leak."
A number of security experts I have spoken to confirm that the Spectre problem has not gone away, nor is it going to any time soon. There is some concern, however, about the messaging that is emerging around this vulnerability.
A great many individuals – not only those who work for Intel – have been putting a lot of time recently into telling everyone that we should calm down, not worry about Spectre, and simply continue with business as usual. There are patches, they say, and even if those patches cause problems now, that will be addressed soon.
It's not quite that simple, and Spectre may ultimately change computing forever. In the short term, it means a lot of pain for some pretty big companies. ...
... We must now assume that everything is compromised. Even the CPUs upon which our workloads run.
... read comments on the website...
