Limelight Forums

CPU Security Breach - Who does it affect, and how
____________________________________________


Reports of a security breaches regarding nearly all processors have been leaked lately. As its speculated, INTEL was the first to take actions to get the whole thing patched up by contacting major OS companies like Windows and Linux to start working at an update which would hopefully fix up the mess. However, they have forced them to keep it secret in order to prevent panic. Users got suspicious when the public Linux Updatelog showed no content, however simply stated "stay tuned", causing some of them to investigate on their own.

EDIT: It is however suspected that the bug was known by INTEL way beforehand. After learning about the security bug INTELS CEO sold all the stocks he could.

How come chips are insecure?

The old KPTI Features, called KAISER, used to protect and prevent any remote access of secured areas, such as the temporary storage stored in the RAM. It however has been found out that this Secutiy Protocol is not inpenetratable. IT Experts have showed in two scenarios (Meltdown and Spectre Attack) that the KAISER protocol is infact insecure, by being able to access private data trough the CPU.

Who does it affect?

Nearly every CPU that has been delivered in this century. This includes both INTEL and AMD Chips. Mobile Phone Processors are also unsafe.

How can it be fixed?

The Chipset manifacturers themselves cant fix it, the OS Developers have to do so. Major updates for both Windows and Linux aswell as Google Phone have already been rolled out.

What effects will this update have?

Usually, security updates do not have any major impact on the user experience. However, since the KTPI Protocol has to be reworked, putting multiple checkerlayers over certain CPU Processes, a decrease of performancepower can be felt.

Windows users can expect a performancedrop from 0.28% - 30% (Numbers vary), Linux users somewhere around 5%.

The stockvalue of INTEL has already dropped due to the leaks made public.


aar/dpa/Reuters/Heise

This is a complete shitshow lol, Intel's CEO doing some sketchy sellouts just before this all happened.

At least we're getting the yearly "Huge security breach" out of the way early.

Some excuse to reduce performance, probably.

EDIT: It is however suspected that the bug was known by INTEL way beforehand. After learning about the security bug INTELS CEO sold all the stocks he could.