Yesterday, a lot of AMD fans were celebrating as it was discovered that Intel’s CPUs were affected by a fundamental design flaw (codenamed ‘Meltdown‘). And while this issue has been addressed by Microsoft and Intel, another design flaw has surfaced that affects all CPUs. Codenamed ‘Spectre‘, this security threat can affect old-gen and current-gen consoles, handhelds, smartphones, and PC systems using both Intel’s and AMD’s CPUs.
While Spectre is more difficult to exploit than Meltdown (the design flaw that affected Intel’s CPUs), it affects every modern CPU and there is currently no fix for it. This basically means that both Intel and AMD will have to completely change the architecture of their future processors in order to fix it on a hardware level.
Spectre breaks the isolation between different applications. It allows an attacker to trick error-free programs, which follow best practices, into leaking their secrets. Contrary to Meltdown, Spectre tricks other applications into accessing arbitrary locations in their memory.
We don’t know what Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nintendo and AMD will do in order to resolve this security issue. According to Google, it is possible to prevent specific known exploits based on Spectre through software patches. However, this may result in an additional performance hit once and if such a patch comes out. Furthermore, this potential performance hit will affect all platforms, both consoles and PC systems.
Right now Microsoft has only issued a security fix for Meltdown and there hasn’t been any software patch for Spectre!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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we are doomed!
Xbox dOne
PlayStation 4closure
I see what you did there….nice try! 🙂
PieCes
Goddamn that NVidia. Bet Gameworks infected AMD CPUs. Is there no end to the Green Devil’s evil?
Pease tell me you’re joking.
He is.
Can’t you tell?
I’ve been trained by the internet to never overestimate someone’s intelligence. That said, I had a good laugh 😀
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b4f4659028a77d3725566850a9038a70b929a186431d88db039b087c22c23897.jpg
They hit Intel too ever since Intel started working with Amd to make a new APU with HBM
Just imagine a similar 30% loss of performance on consoles or smartphones…
That’s not gonna happen. Not even close. This exploit and the 3rd variant (Meltdown), rely on access to kernel address space. The fix for all variants degrades performance in scenarios with lots of syscalls. The key difference is that variant 1 and 2 affect far more devices than variant 3. And while Variants 1 and 2 affect AMD chips, the fact that AMD chips don’t use speculative execution reduces the chance of Spectre attacks to near zero.
That was for the lolz considering how they can’t maintain a 30FPS framerate… Of course it won’t be the case… Stop killing the fun 😉
Spectre is a pain to fix and to hard to exploit. As fir melt and zen is immune intel is ubber boned because of decade old flaw
So everything what have a cpu is vulnerable . Good start 2018. . . .
Has CNN blamed it on a Russian conspiracy yet?
Nah . Its Kim Jong-Un he is hacking the world with WIN95 .
HEHEHE 😀
Damn that pesky Rocketman with his small nuclear button!
CNN just reports news, the actual accusation comes from U.S intelligence committees.. >_>
“CNN just reports news”
How breathtakingly ignorant and naive you are.
Wait. I’m going to get my lunch. Comment section, here I go.
You own a toaster? You are vulnerable.
I am a toaster so this sends chills down my power cord.
Pinch a nipple, it will make it all better.
When your bread/waffle always gets overdone…you know its been hacked and toaster compromised!!
It all makes sense now! Hacking my toast/bagel/waffle/thingsthataretyummy gets people hurt!
So we’ve gone from CPU wars to CPU Jihad.
AMD is vulnerable to the first variant, but not to the second or third one.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ce15d5546ae6d99a1ae167e4288ef4a5124b1bcebe23b978cde086bd0183d131.jpg
What I am interested is can you use this to jailbreak ps4/pro and xbox1/s/x and run games obtained by other ways? 🙂
lol
so playstation 4 can be hacked now and soon we’ll be able to play cracked games on it?
Where have you been? You already can. 🙂
Is my calculator also vulnerable? :p
AMD is only vulnerable to variant 1 (spectre), which is easily resolved with basically no performance hit. Nice!
Also, 3 flaws now, so the problem tripled! Variants 2 and 3 (Meltdown) affect ARM and Intel only. Not nice!
http://static.adweek.com/adweek.com-prod/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2012/12/wtf-did-i-just-read.jpg
Meltdown is way more important (and potentially dangerous) than Spectre…
All 3 but only one attack meltdown hurts performance and that one only affects Intel CPU’s.
spoiler alert this is all a conspiracy to add more backdoors onto your hardware/bios/etc like intel has openly admitted to doing with the nsa/etc
rumors been going around for awhile of a false flag cyber terrorist attack. this is the setup. be warned. be prepared.stay safe.god bless.
AMD Statement:
Variant One
Bounds Check Bypass
Resolved by software / OS updates to be made available by system
vendors and manufacturers. Negligible performance impact expected.
Variant Two
Branch Target Injection
Differences in AMD architecture mean there is a near zero risk of
exploitation of this variant. Vulnerability to Variant 2 has not been
demonstrated on AMD processors to date.
Variant Three
Rogue Data Cache Load
Zero AMD vulnerability due to AMD architecture differences.
Soo…
Guess i’ll just fkoff from the cpu market for the next 2gens. There’s no way they’re going to modify upcoming gens like that. That stuff takes time i suppose.