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0 pointsTomVDB6y ago0 comments

If ARM and AMD CPUs are not affected, then speculative execution in general is not the issue.

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But they are, ARM to both a Meltdown variant and Spectre, as well IBM's POWER and mainframe chips, and AMD to Spectre.

They are not for all kind of attacks.

E.g. this new one can only be reproduced on Intel, not on AMD and ARM.

If you want to ban speculative execution for everything, you need to make the case that it's a fundamental issue and not an implementation specific issue.

Right now, that's not the case for many of these vulnerabilities.

dfrage6y ago

As I understand it, the Intel only vulnerabilities, Foreshadow/L1TF, and this set which I've not looked at the details of yet, are targeting specific Intel features, and there's no reason to believe a similar focus on the other companies' products wouldn't also find unique problems.

For example, the first version of Foreshadow went after the SGX enclave. Given how widespread Meltdown and Spectre bugs are, there's absolutely no reason to believe that the other vendors don't have similar unique problems.

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dfrage6y ago

But they are, ARM to both a Meltdown variant and Spectre, as well IBM's POWER and mainframe chips, and AMD to Spectre.

TomVDBOP6y ago

They are not for all kind of attacks.

E.g. this new one can only be reproduced on Intel, not on AMD and ARM.

If you want to ban speculative execution for everything, you need to make the case that it's a fundamental issue and not an implementation specific issue.

Right now, that's not the case for many of these vulnerabilities.

dfrage6y ago

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