Gadgetory

we know there's a big story when we got several tweets messages and emails about one topic in rapid succession and that topic is the new Intel and potentially AMD an armed security vulnerability that's been discussed on the Internet this would be pertaining to specter and meltdown two new attacks that can be used to gain access to information on your computer these topics enter areas where I am personally not an expert I am NOT knowledgeable enough on them to provide an opinionated response and a lot of you wanted that when tweeting at us so what we did instead is some research we looked around a lot dug up all the information we could on these topics and we've put together a piece that should hopefully give you information on what this vulnerability is from a non opinionated standpoint just strict facts about everything and how it impacts you what the next steps are for the companies involved and the discussion on performance so the point here is to look at this completely factually and journalistically and avoid opinions because again it's not really what we do but we can do research and we do know a technology a bit so hopefully this helps you out with understanding what all of this is before we get into that this content is brought to you by the Thermaltake flow RGB closed-loop liquid cooler which is a 360 millimetre radiator plus 3 120 fans that are RGB illuminated if then we'll take it ringg fans at that this is a 4.5 done a stack pump which is one of the faster pumps you can learn more at the link in the description below the shortest version of the issue is this Linux and windows operating systems are undergoing major reworks to cope with security vulnerabilities that are present on the last 10 years worth of Intel CPUs with Spectre exploits discovered on AMD arm and Intel CPUs alike everyone is affected and at least some capacity but the exploits affecting each vendor vary the hardware itself isn't insecure or physically compromised but it requires software changes to close security holes that are present the concern from the community has been how these security holes will change the performance because as we close those initial reports from gr secure indicated between 5% and 29% performance deficit and note that the commonly cited 29% number was derived from a 6700 test bench with page table isolation one of the proposed hardening techniques for increasing security this was found with our ap or rap Linux benchmarks and the number is not a blanket number for all performance changes but we'll get to that momentarily what is the vulnerability though project zero a Google team reported that there is a system call issue with the kernel which could lead to security vulnerabilities when a virtual memory allocation is read projects a zero reported this issue to not only Intel but also AMD an arm back in June of 2017 there are two separate attacks that have been developed around this security vulnerability and they are codenamed meltdown and specter meltdown is a breakout attack this means it's capable of exiting the confines of virtual environments and spectre is a speculation execution attack meltdown is the worst of the two attacks and is known presently to affect Intel with indeterminate effect on Andy and arm the team is still researching and Spectre does affect Intel Andy and arm alike but we'll see about meltdown both attacks are capable of intercepting user data that is currently being read particularly when involving virtual memory allocation these attacks give access to data stored in memory which could include passwords usernames and other transactions that are being actively moved between memory and the CPU this is particularly concerning from an enterprise or service standpoint as one of the attacks leverages at branch prediction exploits too as a KVM guest read the memory of the host kernel this has severe implications for virtual machine users primarily those who may slice servers into multiple virtualized environments for customer use meltdown for example is capable of granting an attacker full access or control over the contents of physical memory on the machine and that breaks the boundaries of virtual machines project zero notes that the meltdown quote brakes the mechanism that keeps applications from accessing arbitrary system memory and that quote Specter tricks other applications into accessing arbitrary memory locations in their memory stating further that both attacks use side-channel attacks to obtain information from the accessed memory location the researchers at behind meltdown inspector have published papers on these exploits and have also published an FAQ for consumers the very first question am i affected by the bug the answer is equally simple most certainly yes the researchers note that we meltdown exploit has worked on Intel CPUs dating back to 2011 and they've also noted that they are not yet clear on whether meltdown explicitly works on arm or AMD processors when we asked Intel for a statement we were sent this page where the company alleges that these exploits may also affect Andy and arm we've asked AMD for a statement countering this but we are currently in a holding pattern Andy did however publish its own a short note about these exploits as of now Andy isn't mostly noting that they're aware of the vulnerabilities and that the company is investigating further critically Andy notes that they do not think these exploits have been used in the public domain though the meltdown researchers say that they are uncertain whether meltdown or meltdown like attacks have been deployed publicly so we're not fully sure yet as for the specter attack the team notes that this exploit has been verified on Intel Andy and ARM processors and notes that it will work against nearly every type of computer including smartphones and cloud servers Google by the way has confirmed that Android is affected and has issued a security advisory about the attack Intel issued a statement finally and Andy issued its own short news item neither of the latter have had much information while google has published some of the most detail on the subject if you're interested in further reading check out what project 0 wrote so then why did this happen at all to begin with the meltdown white paper indicates a root cause being branch prediction on the cpu's particularly speculative branch prediction the foundation for spectres name speculative prediction is something we have talked about before primarily with GPU architectures branch prediction is the goal of the CPU or GPU to execute commands before those commands are ever issued the idea is to reduce wait time maybe the command never comes and so the work is wasted but the potential upside is worth it as the pipeline is sped up and tasks can execute with lower latency and in this instance of the attack some data can get left behind in l1 cache which should be protected data but the exploit is able to gain access to that orphaned information giving attackers access to potentially sensitive data like passwords or usernames Specter is interesting this one is able to attack user space in virtual machines the white paper details an example where Java Script code running inside of a Google Chrome browser could be leveraged to read data sent through Chrome like reading a field from inputs on websites this attack can be deployed through JavaScript downloads and as we understand it this could mean that an ad network compromised for example could have disastrous effect this has already been tested as successful by the way on the Chrome browser and could theoretically work on other browsers so it's not just hypothetical this works as an attack this issue doesn't come down to just sacrificing security for sake of speed either kernel level security would indicate that memory should be protected by other models like address space layout randomization GN patreon backer Steve straizo was able to provide a great example of this and quoting Steve with address space layout randomization or ASLR it's basically real inking a program at random locations at launch time you can't just say give me the memory at zero by de adb EEF because I know that the users password is there as well as kernel ASLR or a KS lr which does the same thing but for kernel memory since the kernels memory isn't protected any more it can be read at will by the attacker it's not a speed versus security thing the security was supposed to happen elsewhere what happens now I expect a large dump of information on January 9th this is when the embargo lifts on everything that's been kept behind doors so far this will be the next major milestone for us and we point at which the general consumer and in our community we should be able to obtain a better understanding of what's going on and if it changes the way pcs perform the most immediate steps are being taken by the hardware and software manufacturers with Microsoft fast-tracking updates to Windows for security this is a software level solution as the hardware itself is not physically compromised if you own affected CPUs and you do even if specters affecting AMD you can expect software level patches to help resolve some of these concerns arm has already developed software solutions that can mitigate the effect of Spectre specifically Linux kernel virtual memory systems are already being overhauled and Microsoft is working toward a January 9th patch and has already issued improvements to the fast-track or fast train users the question is whether or not any of these fixes will impact performance negatively that's the big concern so then performance claims early claims by gr security have gone through a game of telephone at this point initial reports showed potential for 5% to 30% performance deficit in some specific tasks with different tasks suffering in different ways the performance loss comes by the way of introducing more latency done by nature of adding more layers of security what this does not mean however is that every CPU in every application will instantly be 30% slower most of the major performance slowdowns have been reported with enterprise level software not necessarily consumer level software for onyx for instance has already published some preliminary gaming benchmarks on Linux and they have shown a performance deficit that is largely within margin of error this is only one operating system of course with only a few games so there's room for other games OS Azure CPUs to be impacted in greater ways but for now it doesn't look too bad for gaming what we're most curious about though is the impact to workstation and for type applications these straddle a line between consumer and enterprise uses and we're unclear of the performance losses and whether they can be mitigated with more time for example of these panicked fixes were just thrown together quickly there may be better solutions later this isn't to downplay the significance of the exploit nor the significance of lost performance but to restore some sanity to the discussion when citing numbers for example 30% performance loss it's important to know where they come from and if they impact the implications you're talking about in that context we're waiting on further performance testing at this point and we'll have to see how that goes with CES going on as well because right now we've got CES to worry about as does everyone else and the patch publicly will launch on january 9th which is when CES is basically starting so that's nice gifts from Microsoft and everyone else in the community we will be talking with vendors at CES about this performance concern or these security concerns in general and we'll just have to update from there until that time though we're gonna do our best to stay on top of the story you can get faster and updates to Windows and do some preliminary testing we might but it's just a question of if we have time before the flight and we probably don't but we'll try and in the meantime don't be too concerned because there's not a lot you can do anyway and just see what happens with the patch if you do want to use the faster an update though of course be aware that there are some stability concerns with any early deployments of a patch or OS and it's just a matter of how much you think or how likely you think you are to be affected by this bug Intel statements thus far have left a lot to be desired they are not responding in a way that that really reveals information that could be useful in determining what specifically they plan to do in the future to resolve this and tailed it a big statement saying they're gonna be more aggressive in the future so this would be a good time Intel to show us what you mean by that Andy has issued a brief it's not really a statement but just just a brief really short quote that they are aware of vulnerabilities and they're researching them we've been in contact with both companies we did not receive more from Intel than the statement they've already publicly posted andy is they basically have us in a holding pattern and we'll update everyone via the website gamers nexus net which will link below if they do provide more information for us but that's all for now hopefully this type of video worked out for you because as stated it's not really our core expertise so it came down to researching and compiling everything to just provide a facts only overview of it and hopefully we did an okay job of that for you quick thanks to Steve Strasser from the GN patreon community who also runs a YouTube channel stress byte Steve's Reza is a developer and I was a decent amount about this stuff though he didn't want me to note that he's not a security expert but he did help provide a lot of the backing information for this topic so subscribe for more as always you go to patreon.com/scishow and extra stops that directly or store gamers nexus net to ping my shirt like this one I'll see you all next time