Liu Yan
January 9, Apple pushed the security system updates.
A security issue derived from chip-level vulnerabilities sparked the worst technological crisis in history, affecting all of the world's computers, smartphones and cloud computing servers, and the consumer was rethinking what is the security attribute of modern hardware products The core principle?
According to the experts, the source of this risk can be traced back to the earliest 60s of the last century, when IBM introduced Out Of Order Execution technology, the enhanced version of out-of-order execution is branch prediction. Execution and branch prediction have become standard in high-performance processors.
The security incident led Intel, which dominates the server and PC chip markets, into a crisis that raised questions about the safety of Intel products.
In fact, more than Intel's products are implicated in branch-predictive design, chipsets such as X86, ARM and IBM Power are also involved, and niche architectures such as MIPS are not immune.So Windows, Linux, MacOS, Mainstream operating systems such as Android have also been affected to varying degrees.
In response to the security crisis, Intel chipmakers and their customers and partners, including giants such as Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft formed a major technology company coalition to work together to close the security breaches.
However, the average consumer wants a simple and straightforward solution, and is not the most secure solution for crowd watching the idea of recalling every bug-free CPU for another buggy version?
In the past, we encountered are operating system vulnerabilities, such as WannaCry virus extortion bitcoin.But this is the underlying CPU architecture problems can not be solved by the CPU alone, the hardware layer, the system layer, the application layer coordination, industry-wide common Work hard.
At the same time, there is no objective technology that needs to be viewed. Technology products have the same shelf life as other products, just as the CPU vulnerabilities discovered this time. Technology development has its own limitations. The technology that decided to be safe ten years ago It may not be reliable.
So, this chip-level loopholes are bound to be avoided? Between high performance and reliability, the company should re-evaluate, make appropriate concessions? This issue requires industry to give the answer together.