APPLE SECURITY UPDATE FOR SPECTRE SOFTWARE
APPLE SECURITY UPDATE FOR SPECTRE CODE

and let people decide if they think it's really necessary for a computer that is mostly used for playing games on Steam. And all the 'fixes' did say there would be something of a performance hit, also made me think that these fixes should be options for people. I remembered all these security issues hitting the news, but even then I was really wondering how much my home computers would really be at risk. For normal people and most businesses, this is another non-issue.yea, I was wondering the same.

APPLE SECURITY UPDATE FOR SPECTRE CODE

So only a potential concern if you are one of those people who purposely negate updates.Īs usual, you need to get the code on the machine before it can attempt to exploit these flaws in the first place, so the security has already been compromised in some other less sophisticated way before the attempt can ever begin. Of course, mitigated and fixed by all the intervening patches. For normal people and most businesses, this is another non-issue.There is/was one, but only 3 years later. They are hypotheticals to keep in mind just in case for absolutely mission-critical high-stakes secrecy/privacy (no unknown code should be allowed anywhere near those machines) and attempt to mitigate in future designs.Īs usual, you need to get the code on the machine before it can attempt to exploit these flaws in the first place, so the security has already been compromised in some other less sophisticated way before the attempt can ever begin. InvalidError said:AFAIK, all of the previous attacks never went beyond proof-of-concept in a curated lab environment optimized for the best chances of success possible and would be next to impossible to pull off in a real-world environment where typical systems have a bunch of background activity raising the background noise level too much for these to be practical. Instead, they could be used for specific targeted attacks from sophisticated players, like nation-states. To that end, chances that the new Spectre vulnerabilities will lead to widespread wrongdoings are rather low.

APPLE SECURITY UPDATE FOR SPECTRE SOFTWARE

One thing to keep in mind is that exploiting micro-ops cache vulnerabilities is extremely tricky as such malware will have to bypass all other software and hardware security measures that modern systems have and then execute a very specific type of attack that is unconventional, to say the least. Yet another way is to implement a performance counter-based monitoring that detects anomalies, but the technique is prone to misclassification errors, whereas frequent probing leads to significant performance degradation. However, as the number of protection domains increase, such partitioning would translate into heavy underutilization of the micro-op cache, removing much of its performance advantages. The second way is to partition micro-op caches based on privileges. One of the ways is to flush the micro-op cache at domain crossings, but since modern CPUs need to flush the Instruction Translation Lookaside Buffer (iTLB) to flush the micro-op cache, frequent flushing of both will 'lead to heavy performance consequences, as the processor can make no forward progress until the iTLB refills.'

Apple security update for spectre