Intel mitigates a new vulnerability you knew about ... FOR MORE THAN A YEAR AGO!
More than a year ago, they discovered a new vulnerability in Intel processors, and now the company is releasing mitigations for that vulnerability.
Yet another vulnerability has been discovered in Intel processors. Last May, the company published a set of vulnerabilities called the Microprocessor Weakness Set (MDS) . A malicious attacker could steal processor data because this information is not protected. Intel suggested disabling HyperThreading as a solution.
Disabling HyperThreading or processing threads leads to a large amount of performance loss. A vulnerability mitigation was subsequently released with a loss of performance on the processors. The performance loss with the vulnerability is far less than disabling threads.
Come on, more vulnerabilities in Intel processors
MDS is a speculative execution side channel attack that can allow malicious actors to execute code locally to extract sensitive data that would otherwise be protected by the architectural mechanisms of Intel processors. This vulnerability affected all the company's processors released between 2011 and 2018.
But MDS is a worse vulnerability than expected, since it offers a vulnerability called TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA). In turn, this vulnerability is a derivation of ZombieLoad. But it is that Intel has highlighted that there is a mitigation of the Conditional Jumping Code (JCC in English). So a new patch is necessary which implies another performance loss.
It should be noted that Intel has known about this vulnerability for more than a year. According to the researchers who found it, they informed the company more than a year ago.
TAA, according to Intel, allows "an attacker another way to leak data" on the latest processors. Not even the 9th Generation of processors is spared, which is the Coffee Lake Refresh family. It appears that the Comet Lake and Canon Lake processors will be the only ones to escape the vulnerability. So low-power notebook processors would be saved.
How much performance do Intel processors lose?
Phoronix reportedly conducted several tests with the Core i9-7960X and Xeon Silver 4108 processors. According to the benchmarks, these processors showed a significant performance drop. Under Graphics Magick v1.3.33, they experienced up to an 18% performance loss. In Apache Benchmark v2.4.29, the performance loss was around 9%. Intel contradicts these figures, stating that the performance loss will be between 0% and 4%.
