L1 Terminal Fault speculative side channel

ISSUE DESCRIPTION In x86 nomenclature, a Terminal Fault is a pagetable walk which aborts due to the page being not present e.g. paged out to disk, or because of reserved bits being set. Architecturally, such a memory access will result in a page fault exception, but some processors will...

Intel’s ‘Virtual Fences’ Spectre Fix Won’t Protect Against Variant 4

Spectre and Meltdown fixes for Intel chips announced in March, to be embedded into new CPUs, do not address the newly disclosed Variant 4, sources said. Intel introduced hardware-based safeguards to its new chips to protect against the Spectre and Meltdown flaws that rocked the silicon industry...

Intel Details CPU ‘Virtual Fences’ Fix As Safeguard Against Spectre, Meltdown Flaws

Intel introduced hardware-based protections to its new chips to protect against the Spectre and Meltdown flaws that rocked the silicon industry when the vulnerabilities were made public in early 2018. Spectre and Meltdown, which account for three variants of a side-channel analysis security issue...

CPU Design Can Warn of Backdoor Tampering

Scientists have devised a chip design to ensure microprocessors haven’t been surreptitiously equipped with malicious backdoors that could be used to siphon sensitive information or receive instructions from adversaries. Read the full article. The Register...