Intel CPUs Massive Security Flaw issue
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AMD's performance is so far behind that even 30% slower the Intel is still faster and I suspect they have their own issues.
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AMD's performance is so far behind that even 30% slower the Intel is still faster and I suspect they have their own issues.
I'm afraid that depends on what type of tasks the CPU has to perform. For example I've got several HP T5730 thin clients equipped with AMD Sempron 2100+ CPUs at 1GHz, they do WAN/LAN NAT-ing at full interface speed between VLANs (1Gbit/s/2) at only 60% CPU usage. Intel Atoms from that era are nowhere compared to Semprons.
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"I'm afraid that depends on what type of tasks the CPU has to perform. For example I've got several HP T5730 thin clients equipped with AMD Sempron 2100+ CPUs at 1GHz, they do WAN/LAN NAT-ing at full interface speed between VLANs (1Gbit/s/2) at only 60% CPU usage. Intel Atoms from that era are nowhere compared to Semprons."
Thats good to know, thanks for the info
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If I have to trade speed for security, I choose security every time. With Intel, it used to be a win-win but, with recent news… I just don't believe it so blindly anymore. Of course AMD is not the cure to all your problems but it sure starts to seem a little better.
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AMD's performance is so far behind that even 30% slower the Intel is still faster and I suspect they have their own issues.
From what I have read, AMD's latest Threadripper CPUs are giving Intel a run for their money, and they're cheaper. As for issues, unless you have something concrete then you can't really make that claim. I've seen others saying the same thing on other tech forums, that this Intel bug is bad but AMD might maybe perhaps possibly have something as bad or worse. It's pure FUD.
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There you go:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/security-flaws-affect-every-intel-chip-since-1995-arm-processors-vulnerable/
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More info here:
https://spectreattack.com/
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
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From my understanding of the problem all x86 processors are effected but the AMD processors have the ability to turn off the branch prediction feature. It would seem to me that if some bioses can be updated to turn this feature off on Intel Processors than the problem can be minimized without the 5% performance hit. We all want speed and putting the Kernel page file and user page file in the same space was a way for them to achieve this. I don't really think it's fair to blame Intel. Security is really hard and I would say the problem is really at the OS level. OS makers are working on the fix now so I would say everyone is doing their job. I would imagine in the future Intel processors will have the ability to turn the branch prediction off which will fix this issue.
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From my understanding of the problem all x86 processors are effected but the AMD processors have the ability to turn off the branch prediction feature. It would seem to me that if some bioses can be updated to turn this feature off on Intel Processors than the problem can be minimized without the 5% performance hit. We all want speed and putting the Kernel page file and user page file in the same space was a way for them to achieve this. I don't really think it's fair to blame Intel. Security is really hard and I would say the problem is really at the OS level. OS makers are working on the fix now so I would say everyone is doing their job. I would imagine in the future Intel processors will have the ability to turn the branch prediction off which will fix this issue.
Turning off branch prediction would be a much more significant performance hit. The impact of KPTI is felt on code with a lot of system calls, and has close to zero impact on code that stays in user land. Killing branch prediction would impact everything.
It's also worth pointing out that this isn't a kernel-specific issue, and that side channel attacks can impact any program that tries to isolate untrusted code. (For example, a browser running javascript.) The kernel mitigations don't fix all of those other programs–and AMD CPUs are impacted by this just as much as Intel CPUs.
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Can you please elaborate a little bit this, so we can understand what you mean? Especially the "most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context ".
The whole pfSense runs as root, including the web interface afaik… -
AMD CPUs are impacted by this just as much as Intel CPUs.
AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel
page table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture
does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that
access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode
when that access would result in a page fault.The threat and the response to the three variants differ by microprocessor company, and AMD is not susceptible to all three variants. Due to differences in AMD's architecture, we believe there is a near zero risk to AMD processors at this time. We expect the security research to be published later today and will provide further updates at that time.
Howerver, ARM prcessors are affected:
ARM, whose chip designs are widely used in cell phones and other devices, confirmed some of its chip architectures are affected, including some of its Cortex-A processors. "This method requires malware running locally and could result in data being accessed from privileged memory," ARM said in a statement to Axios. "Our Cortex-M processors, which are pervasive in low-power, connected IoT devices, are not impacted."
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@KOM:
AMD's performance is so far behind that even 30% slower the Intel is still faster and I suspect they have their own issues.
From what I have read, AMD's latest Threadripper CPUs are giving Intel a run for their money, and they're cheaper. As for issues, unless you have something concrete then you can't really make that claim. I've seen others saying the same thing on other tech forums, that this Intel bug is bad but AMD might maybe perhaps possibly have something as bad or worse. It's pure FUD.
Sorry to disagree
Threadripper does nearly half the work clock per cycle of an Intel plus they run much hotter and are less power efficient
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This was true 15 years ago, can't believe they are still the same.
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Here is 1 example the AMD has 8 cores 16 threads Intel 4 core 8 threads
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/amd-ryzen-benchmarks,review-4232.html
I did not reed the post in detail but at a quick look the Intel did better with less cores , I am not trying to make Intel look better just trying to justify if switching to AMD will be worth it as you still have to buy expensive CPUs like ryzen to get good performance
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AMD are hit too
http://bgr.com/2018/01/03/intel-security-flaw-also-arm-amd-macos-already-patched/
The only thing different looks like Intel are doing something about it and AMD has not responded yet
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AMD CPUs are impacted by this just as much as Intel CPUs.
Not true
No, completely true. First, you trimmed off one heck of a lot of context that's really important:
It's also worth pointing out that this isn't a kernel-specific issue, and that side channel attacks can impact any program that tries to isolate untrusted code. (For example, a browser running javascript.) The kernel mitigations don't fix all of those other programs–and AMD CPUs are impacted by this just as much as Intel CPUs.
What a lot of fanboys seem to be missing in their urgency to have an intel bonfire is that this is about a class of vulnerabilities, not a specific vulnerability. AMD processors seem at this point to not be vulnerable to one particular mode of attack, but are vulnerable to other modes of attack. And I guarantee that this area of research will get a lot more attention, and there will be other exploit vectors discovered. Side channel attacks have simply not been something that commodity CPU vendors have worried about, so to some degree finding them is like shooting fish in a barrel. (This is true of all the vendors, not just intel.) "Meltdown" is getting most of the press (that which isn't completely confused about the various attack vectors) and is the biggest PITA for shared infrastructure providers, but "Spectre" is actually much harder to fix, and just as relevant to actual users who do things like browse the web. The most straightforward fixes involve giving up any hope of sandboxing potentially malicious code within a process and relying on process isolation instead–which will have a performance impact on everyone's web browsing.
And as long as we're talking about AMD, they really botched up the disclosure timeline by publicly asserting that they weren't vulnerable to certain kinds of cache timing attacks in the context of the linux kpti patches...people are going to think twice before trusting AMD to keep their mouths shut in the future.
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Can you please elaborate a little bit this, so we can understand what you mean? Especially the "most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context ".
The whole pfSense runs as root, including the web interface afaik…My understanding of this is that one application running on the OS would be able to improperly read memory used by other applications. Obviously this is bad if some rogue app/script can pull sensitive data from other apps on a workstation. Also bad if one VM can read data from another. On a dedicated firewall, the OS is not going to be running untrusted apps. I don't see much of an attack vector on a firewall. I certainly wouldn't worry about pfSense until I had Hypervisors, servers, and end user workstations taken care of.
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Engineering question, if the Meltdown and Spectre kernel fixes reduces pfSense performance by 5% or more, is that prudent ?
If Meltdown and Spectre require malicious code running locally, all bets are off, and there are far easier methods to extract credentials.
Bottom line, are the Meltdown and Spectre fixes appropriate for an appliance like pfSense ?
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@lra:
Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Engineering question, if the Meltdown and Spectre kernel fixes reduces pfSense performance by 5% or more, is that prudent ?
If Meltdown and Spectre require malicious code running locally, all bets are off, and there are far easier methods to extract credentials.
Bottom line, are the Meltdown and Spectre fixes appropriate for an appliance like pfSense ?
From what I can tell both Meltdown and Spectre use very similar methodologies to gain access to L1 cache memory. Looks like they take advantage of speculative out-of-order features, a form of execution parallelism through predictive execution, to access L1 cache by attempting to create an out-of-order execution on one core while another core processes a prior instruction that is meant to cause an exception. It then produces a race-condition where it tries to access L1 cache from within the out-of-order sequence before the processor has time to terminate the original thread by retiring the whole set of instructions and clearing the L1 of memory and code. During this race condition, perhaps 200 clock cycles, it needs to determine if bits in memory are a 1 or a 0, the details which honestly elude me but seem to involve measuring the time caused by side-effecting the microarchitecture. Even after that it still needs to communicate that outside of the process then using the exception-handling to communicate/raise a couple of registers outside of that thread to the process where it can display the contents to the attacker.
I haven't seen any working meltdown/spectre example code that can get kernel data but a couple that successfully get user-mode memory pages. I'd find it prudent to patch on shared-infrastructure where resources aren't shared at the VM level but at the container level. For pfSense, an attacker would need to have root/wheel access as a prerequisite to the machine, so they wouldn't be needing to compile/inject cache-exploiting code into other processes to see their memory in the first place. For that reason it means it is extremely unlikely to be a primary attack vector on a firewall system.
As for CPU usage, it's difficult to tell what the performance impact will be. PostgreSQL suggests somewhere between 17% ~ 23%. I think it's fairly significant but for a firewall I don't know if anyone will notice. Our pfSense setup uses perhaps 5% ~ 10% CPU performance, so 23% I don't think will be recognizable … but who knows, maybe it'll affect traffic-shaping. For hypervisors I could see the performance impact being noticeable when systems are at or near computing capacity.
