Intel recently announced that it has patched all CPU processor products for the past five years, and will redesign the hardware in the next generation of products, natural immune loopholes.
At this point, the Spectre specter that has stirred up a lot of rumors, and Meltdown's two major loopholes can be said to have come to an end. Then, both of them make the entire industry nervous. What are the loopholes in global user panic?
In order to facilitate the user's understanding, Intel released a video to popularly make loopholes in popular science.
First of all, Ghost, the blown-out vulnerability is the collective name of three security vulnerability variants discovered by the Google Project Zero team. Among them, vulnerabilities variant 1 and variant 2 are different aspects of the ghost vulnerability because they are all executed through deception, and the ghost is The name of the evil organization that confronted James Bond in the "007" movie.
Vulnerability variant 3 is a blown loop because it can effectively 'blown' the processor's security.
Here we illustrate with Loop variant 2.
It takes advantage of an important feature of computers, namely Speculative executionPrediction execution can enhance the speed and performance of the CPU, predicting what the CPU might do before the CPU actually makes a request.
The predictive execution function is like a pathfinder, running in front of many other functions and capabilities of the CPU. Its goal is to speed up the entire system by proactively exploring the various possible tasks of the CPU.
Imagine that when our Pathfinder walks halfway, he encounters a multiple intersection situation: A guide suddenly appears, directing it to take a specific route.
But unfortunately, That guide is actually a bad guy. It is a system that enters through malicious programs.
As we pass through the intersection, the villain secretly binds himself to the Pathfinder. Then he may see some of the things that our Pathfinder saw during this part of the journey, including private information.
In the end, the pathfinder will find himself walking the wrong path, and then return to the original intersection, and get back on track, but at that time, the bad guys may have obtained the information they wanted.
Intel has designed a new set of CPU hardware features that work with the operating system to create a virtual fence that protects the system and the data held in it from this application-predicting execution method.
In the example we have just mentioned, it can make potential guides, or bad guys, completely away from the computer's decision-making process, and it cannot influence the path taken by the Pathfinder.
As a result, this solution can not only retain the many benefits of predictive execution, but also address the threat of variant 2 at the same time.
