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masklinn

What whole thing? Instruction microcoding is nothing new.

Or do you mean.

- the TXE vulnerability and / or undocumented debugging mode (so microcode wouldn’t have been extracted)

- microcode encryption so the microcode would always have been completely readable

- x86

- Intel itself

?

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The second, possibly combined with something dirty.

I can see why they would sign/encrypt it so that things got safer, but then they should have done a much better job of it. If it was encrypted to hide something that could not stand the light of day then that's an entirely different matter altogether.

Time will tell.

At what point in time did encrypting microcode in processors become common? Is this a relatively recent practice?

IIRC, it happened when IME was introduced. Maybe 2008?

Then AMD PSP did the same starting in 2013.

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