Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities Intel (and AMD) Chip Bug

Anonymous
2018-01-04T01:54:57+00:00

A lot of noise on the internet, after Intel confirm that chips have a bug:

https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-responds-to-security-research-findings/ 

This post is to bring some light on this.

1- Intel says is not only their chips affected

2- PCID (Process-Context Identifiers), a chip feature,  has a bug that allow apps (malware) to read data

3- Process-context identifiers (PCIDs) are a facility by which a logical processor may cache information for multiple linear-address spaces. The processor may retain cached information when software switches to a different linear address space with a different PCID.

4- Macintosh and Linux OS are also affected.

Rumors:

1- If you have Haswell (4th-gen) or newer, PCID (Process-Context Identifiers) is enabled. 

2- After apply the patch, performance is going to be slower on newer CPU. Around 5 to 10%.

2- Still if you have older CPU, performance will be affected worse than newer CPUs.

3- To be affected you must have a OS 64 bits. {Correction: 32bits has vulnerability, MS still working on this)

Just as I'm writing this, Linus Torvalds and his team are working on this too:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/2/703

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20180102222354.qikjmf7dvnjgbkxe%40alap3.anarazel.de

Can we get a word from Microsoft?

For windows, What patch is going to address this? (Update: Patch links and KB are listed on postings)

Is that is going to be on the Montly Rollup and/or Security only patches? (Update: See the links posted)

If performance is going to suffer, can we be able to uninstall such patch? (Update: Microsoft published a document about it, See the links posted)

Please, any info will be appreciated.

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Security and privacy

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-01-17T15:48:20+00:00

    Yikes.  Hopefully the firmware updates will start rolling out soon...

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-01-17T05:16:52+00:00

    Yes.  After the patch update my Haswell X99 motherboard reported that my SSD  C:\   boot drive was inaccessable.   Now working fine, as long as the patch remains uninstalled.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-01-16T22:45:09+00:00

    More Information for older Haswell  and amd chips

    Do you own an older intel cpu? Latest news on Haswell and older chips. Reboot problems 

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16884750/meltdown-spectre-intel-patch-reboot-problems

    Latest news about AMD chips

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/11/16880922/amd-spectre-firmware-updates-ryzen-epyc

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-01-16T22:27:25+00:00

    Microsoft release a document about the loss of performance for this round of patches.

    Understanding the performance impact of Spectre and Meltdown mitigations on Windows Systems

    • With Windows 10 on newer silicon (2016-era PCs with Skylake, Kabylake or newer CPU), benchmarks show single-digit slowdowns, but we don’t expect most users to notice a change because these percentages are reflected in milliseconds.
    • With Windows 10 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), some benchmarks show more significant slowdowns, and we expect that some users will notice a decrease in system performance.
    • With Windows 8 and Windows 7 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), we expect most users to notice a decrease in system performance.
    • Windows Server on any silicon, especially in any IO-intensive application, shows a more significant performance impact when you enable the mitigations to isolate untrusted code within a Windows Server instance. This is why you want to be careful to evaluate the risk of untrusted code for each Windows Server instance, and balance the security versus performance tradeoff for your environment.

    Always test before you deploy on production.

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-01-15T16:46:49+00:00

    Another update, this one comes from VMWare. 

    VMware pulled back the patches for ESXi, for VMSA-2018-0004 and will wait for Intel to release the new update,

    https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52345

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