Comment on AMD confirms security vulnerability in every Zen 1 to Zen 5 processor

InnerScientist@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• kata1yst@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  no performance change

  You must be new here.

  Joking. But seriously, on Linux you can bypass mitigations with basically no security impact if you’re not a cloud provider and get a significant performance boost.

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  • InnerScientist@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    weakness in signature verification algorithm that could allow an administrator privileged attacker to load arbitrary microcode patches

    I don’t think this will affect performance unless you depend on having to quickly update the CPU microcode multiple times a second.

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    • kata1yst@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I apologize for being glib.

      Agreed, shouldn’t affect performance. But also depends on how they see best to patch the vulnerability. The microcode patch mechanism is the currently understood vector, but might not be the only way to exploit the actual underlying vulnerability.

      I remember the early days of Spectre when the mitigation was “disable branch prediction”, then later they patched a more targeted, performant solution in.

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