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Another Intel Oopsy
What's been dubbed the SWAPGS Attack affects newer Intel CPUs that use speculative execution, including Intel Ivy Bridge chips (introduced in 2012) to the latest processors on the market.
The SWAPGS Attack circumvents all known mitigation techniques deployed against previous side-channel attacks on speculative execution.
Completely eliminating the possibility of side-channel attacks against speculative execution requires completely disabling hyper-threading, which would seriously degrade PC performance.
Microsoft issued a patch to block the SWAPGS Attack as part of their July 9th "Patch Tuesday" updates so make sure you're fully updated asap.
Read more here.
This just never ends...
joe53
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August 8th, 2019 19:00
In fairness Ron, I note that this report comes from BitDefender, which claims they have the only mitigation in the form of their "Hypervisor Introspection" preview technology, whatever that is.
I doubt this technology comes with the BitDefender Free version. It will be interesting to see if others confirm these claims.
On the other hand, I have been contemplating the "speculative execution" of Intel in favor of alternative operating systems for some time ...
joe53
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August 8th, 2019 20:00
That said, I did install the July 2019 cumulative update tonight (4 weeks after its release):
July 9, 2019—KB4507453 (OS Build 18362.239)
RoHe
10 Elder
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August 9th, 2019 11:00
@joe53 - Atta-boy! Keep things updated...
MS confirmed they released the patch for SWAPGS on 9-July...
So when is Intel going to totally redesign their CPUs to permanently fix all these oopsies? - And probably introduce a whole bunch of new ones, meaning full employment for hackers...?