Hardware & Technical All CPU's affected by SPECTRE Vulnerability

The Chairmaker

The Chairmaker
This affects INTEL, AMD and ARM chips.

Link to official technical papers on Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities

https://meltdownattack.com/



For reference the Meltdown vulnerability is the reported issue affecting INTEL. and detailed on other threads in this Forum, just in case people are getting confused and think this is a duplicate thread.
 

Deleted member 110222

D
Can someone explain this to me? First whatever Intel is suffering, now this?

Am I better off just not turning my computer on? All these flaws are proving overwhelming... I don't really understand what's going on. :(
 

jasonbarron

jasonbarron
Un1k0rn said:
Can someone explain this to me? First whatever Intel is suffering, now this?

Am I better off just not turning my computer on? All these flaws are proving overwhelming... I don't really understand what's going on. :(
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Don't worry about it for now, just continue using your computer as normal. The truth is that hardly anybody knows what's going on and the situation is constantly evolving. We'll know more soon. Worst case scenario is that the security holes get plugged in the next few weeks and we lose some cpu performance, but as far as how much we have no way of knowing, so just party like it's 1999 and let the future bide.
 
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Deleted member 110222

D
jasonbarron said:
Don't worry about it for now, just continue using your computer as normal. The truth is that hardly anybody knows what's going on and the situation is constantly evolving. We'll know more soon. Worst case scenario is that the security holes get plugged in the next few weeks and we lose some cpu performance, but as far as how much we have know way of knowing, so just party like it's 1999 and let the future bide.
Click to expand...

Thank you, I do sincerely appreciate it. I'm sure you can understand where I'm coming from when I say lack of clarity generates irrational panic.

And I am the MVP of irrational panic... :D
 

Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
For my part I am not worried because I am a commonplace user without interest for hackers who are looking for values data. And if there is a problem, I always have an image of my disk

I especially regret to have paid so much for an Intel processor with a fundamental flaw
 
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the100thmonkey

the100thmonkey
The Chairmaker said:
This affects INTEL, AMD and ARM chips.

Link to official technical papers on Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities

https://meltdownattack.com/



For reference the Meltdown vulnerability is the reported issue affecting INTEL. and detailed on other threads in this Forum, just in case people are getting confused and think this is a duplicate thread.
Click to expand...
And there was me eyeing a Ryzen 7 CPU/MOBO.

Any suggestions whether the patches for the Spectre vulnerability are going to impact performance? The numbers I'm seeing for Meltdown are a 5%-30% range in performance hit, depending on the application. While I don't think I'll see any impact on performance in E:D in the immediate future, Some other games - BF1 among them, which I do play a lot of - are rather more CPU intensive. The minimum CPU for BF1 is an i5-6600k these days...
 

Morbad

Morbad
Patrick_68000 said:
For my part I am not worried because I am a commonplace user without interest for hackers who are looking for values data.
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Plenty of commonplace users have identities worth stealing via automation or computers that would make nice recruits for a botnet...and with access to kernel space, the malware/viruses that could take advantage of these exploits will often be nigh impossible for commonplace users to detect.
 

lysan

lysan
The Chairmaker said:
This affects INTEL, AMD and ARM chips.

Link to official technical papers on Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities

https://meltdownattack.com/



For reference the Meltdown vulnerability is the reported issue affecting INTEL. and detailed on other threads in this Forum, just in case people are getting confused and think this is a duplicate thread.
Click to expand...

Then the test we can do is worthless, as my system was not in danger?

The Chairmaker said:
This affects INTEL, AMD and ARM chips.

Link to official technical papers on Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities

https://meltdownattack.com/



For reference the Meltdown vulnerability is the reported issue affecting INTEL. and detailed on other threads in this Forum, just in case people are getting confused and think this is a duplicate thread.
Click to expand...

Then the test we can do is worthless, as my system was not in danger?
 

Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
Morbad said:
Plenty of commonplace users have identities worth stealing via automation or computers that would make nice recruits for a botnet...and with access to kernel space, the malware/viruses that could take advantage of these exploits will often be nigh impossible for commonplace users to detect.
Click to expand...

Yes, but the anti-viruses like Avast have already created patches for Meltdown and Spectre which will limit certainly the risks
 

GammaZ

G
Patrick_68000 said:
Yes, but the anti-viruses like Avast have already created patches for Meltdown and Spectre which will limit certainly the risks
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It is impossible to work around completely even on OS and microcode level and some antivirus software claims that they "created a patch to fix it"? I'd ditch such "antivirus" in a second without any hesitation...
 

Spruxxx

Spruxxx
jasonbarron said:
Don't worry about it for now, just continue using your computer as normal. The truth is that hardly anybody knows what's going on and the situation is constantly evolving. We'll know more soon. Worst case scenario is that the security holes get plugged in the next few weeks and we lose some cpu performance, but as far as how much we have no way of knowing, so just party like it's 1999 and let the future bide.
Click to expand...

Personally I'm partying like it's £19.99
 

Morbad

Morbad
The Chairmaker said:
Nvidia can also now be added to the list of companies affected by Spectre.

Geforce graphics affected
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GPUs aren't affected, but GPU makers will patch their drivers to protect them from the Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities of the CPUs the drivers are running on.

Same reason other software is getting patched.
 

GammaZ

G
Patrick_68000 said:
No repair but restrict
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And how some application is going to restrict someone from exploiting hardware-level vulnerability?
They are just trying to make adverts for themselves out of this whole situation, making matters even worse for their users, as false sense of security is really bad thing.
 

Morbad

Morbad
GammaZ said:
And how some application is going to restrict someone from exploiting hardware-level vulnerability?
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By not executing code that exploits that vulnerability, or preventing it from executing in a way that causes harm.

For example, the Firefox 57.0.4 patch prevents (or seriously mitigates) javascript from being used as an attack vector: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-landing-new-class-timing-attack/

There is a crapton of hardware errata in any modern processor, and firmware or software mitigations are common practice. Eventually, once essentially everything is patched, it will be exceedingly rare to find an attack vector even on vulnerable hardware, and people will stop trying to take advantage of the vulnerability because the number of viable targets will be minuscule.

Meltdown and Spectre are pretty serious issues, but it's not the end of the world.

Anyway, the AV patches mention aren't so AV can protect against Meltdown and Specter (they can't, except by detecting and quarantining malware/viruses that use it), it's so the Windows mitigations don't brick the AV (which essentially use rootkits that the Windows patch would break, making unpatched versions of the AV nonfunctional).
 
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