Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcthompson | Hacker News Reader

It's like we spent 20 years building houses out of wood, and then suddenly someone discovered fire. "This is not a flaw in Intel lumber supplies. This new 'fire' leverages chemical properties common to all plant products, potentially compromising structural integrity even though the lumber is operating exactly as it was designed to."

(Edit: It seems this analogy may be overly kind to Intel. Read all the replies to this comment for more information.)

View on HN

> and then suddenly someone discovered fire

This is not really like that. The dangers of speculative execution were known before, and, separately, the processor itself provided memory isolation capabilities. That the processor would ignore its own memory isolation principles when speculating about the next instruction to execute is a critical base of these vulnerabilities.

So maybe a better analogy would be that they built fire retardant layers into buildings, but neglected the fact that heat could still pass through the layers and start fires on the other side without burning the layer itself?

Stop trying to make the analogy fit. It's not a good analogy.

Wouldn't a good analogy rather have the effect of rationalising what's already ridiculous?

Unlike "neglecting the fact that heat could still pass through the layers", speculative execution doesn't merely allow something that was previously possible. It allows something that was previously impossible, and while doing so undermines another, more critical, feature of the processor.

As absurdum, so that they could advertise the home being more efficient, faster to heat and less wasteful of the lucky phenomenon peculiar to their furnace design for running beyond the specification so instead of overheating one room, or expensive distribution, the furnace gets you really quick hot water and the excess energy isn't wasted, so compared to fully internally insulated homes, the benefits just keep adding up, e.g. installing plenum cable would be inefficient because this system dumps the excess heat quickly through the house, the ability to convect nicely preventing past occurrences of furnace fires. To be the most efficient inhabitant (kernel process) Intel recommends you enter and exit the over and under heated rooms frequently to manage your body temperature. This design is excellent for your hyperactive residents, please refer to our release notes for the use of rooms either exclusively or during long operations such as Netflix consumption.

The asbestos is working as intended as insulation/fire retardant. Sorry 'bout the mesothelioma.

This one's good, because, like asbestos, there's not really a good alternative to this on current platforms other than giving up some of the performance value of branch prediction in exchange for long-term safety. As far as I know, asbestos remains an unparalleled material for fireproofing, and it is still used sometimes under controlled conditions, even though we've been forced to accept other materials for general use.

AFAIK, mineral wools and silica fabrics have replaced much of the high temperature insulation that asbestos used to do. I believe they do the job just as well, but they're more expensive because they're manufactured rather than mined.

They made the wood fire retardand but it still burns - just not as easily as untreated wood - while selling it as fireproof wood.

A better analogy would be that they presented specs that showed that the building was supposed to be fire-proof but still insisted on dirverting from the specs and building best practices by cladding it with highly flammable material to improve its heating performance.

Now Intel has his own Grenfel tower.

If this analogy was apt I think I would be on their side - but we're talking about "wood" they designed and the "fire" is not some new phenomenon but an actual thing theyve supposedly designed against (unauthorized access of memory). [from my reading as a lay-person, please let me know if this is incorrect]

The analogy is a bit tortured, but in this case both companies build houses out of wood because it has the be performance and both cover them with fire retardant materials. One company discovered that they could make better houses if the fire retardant material was held on with glue instead of screws, but failed to account for the fact that the fire might melt the glue.

Probably best to just defenstrate this analogy.

I didn't know you could defenestrate abstract things. I thought it was just for people.

Anything can be thrown out a window!

It's like we spent 20 years building houses out of wood, and then suddenly someone discovered fire.

Goodness you just described my current work situation that's causing me to rip my hair out. This is a deeply human problem, and I've spent a year trying to mitigate it, but each time the discussion comes up I leave the conference room feeling like certain actors have a personal financial stake in wool fibers.

(No I don't work for Intel)

At work the issue-tracker has open bugs from 2011 detailing how to do SQL injection attacks using some common search interfaces, but noooooo, the sales team just has to update the visual style of the generated contract PDFs... <sigh>

What they are really saying is "It's not just Intel processors. AMD, ARM, and others are just as vulnerable."

Which is half true. All of them are vulnerable to Spectre. So far as I've heard only Intel (and maybe ARM) are vulnerable to Meltdown, because Meltdown exploits the lack of security checks on speculative execution that only Intel implemented. It's ambiguous if ARM is vulnerable, I've only heard people saying either "maybe" or that they haven't validated that.

Edit: Elsewhere I found a link to ARMs page where they breakdown exactly which of their processors are vulnerable to both Metldown and Spectre and it looks like quite a few of them are vulnerable to one or both of them.

I recognize the positive spin, the fact of hardware vulnerability is still little understood, and the trust placed in the cloud ecosystems is almost absolute. I'm aware that I would be planning to go on a Microsoft like security commitment and the sheer resources available to Intel if concentrated on the silicon features capable of e.g. detecting a miscreant hypervisor look like the next wave of products and marketing. To achieve this spin, however, Intel needs to day much more than they have. They can maintain their current line but score points with sceptics by demonstrating how some attacks work on Intel processors in the wild. Coordinated with Industry wide patches, making more point which is missed here how Microsoft and others patched branches in November, the wrap is to offer all customers running on vulnerable silicon migration and s performance bump. This is not a cheap process, but the political climate almost demands resolution at this level.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com