Hector Martin

CPU bug wars update: the latest attack against AMD CPUs just leaks memory access patterns. This is basically inherent in how caches work. It's not even a speculation attack. Intel still has the lead in designing CPUs that give up all their secrets *by design* in speculation.

You think Intel DESIGNED their chips to cause security problems and lose them sales? Come the fuck on.

I think intel DESIGNED their chips under the mantra that anything that happens in speculation doesn't matter and no transistor shall be "wasted" on that, and any engineers who brought up security concerns were ignored.

You realize that nobody, nobody anywhere, brought up security concerns about these features until they'd been in every CPU for like over a decade, right? It's not JUST Intel that missed it. Either don't turn an "oops" into "Intel engineers are evil monsters!" Ridiculous.

Have you missed the part where Intel has a zillion data leaks and AMD doesn't? There's a difference between "oh we can do interesting things in speculation" and "<Intel> who needs page tables? your virtual address is now physical in speculation".

The fact of the matter is Intel designed their CPUs under the clearly-flawed assumption that anything that happens in speculation stays in speculation, and with absolutely no concern whatsoever for defense in depth (i.e. stopping bad/illegal things early, not late)