Media is going crazy about #Meltdown and #Spectre. Should you panic, too?
Here are some of my thoughts on that recent security desaster:
- Don’t worry. Your systems have been damaged for twenty years, probably. A hardware vendor (probably more, maybe all of them) sold buggy chips, and they have been broken since 1995 or so.
- It became known during the summer of 2017. At least, but surely not only since then a realistic chance of exploits was around, which became imminent some weeks ago and led Google/Intel to withdrawing from deadline and going public.
- Yes, your systems are most likely affected. If you were not asked recently (i.e. since last Wednesday) to upgrade your kernel, then you have a problem. You are not affected if you are running hardware older than 1995 or some ARM stuff. Your kernel should now be 4.14.11 or newer – or contain backported code if it is an older version.
- The patches deployed by all major OS vendors last week will make your systems significantly slower. However they will fix most of the problems, but not the ones that are so deep into hardware that no software can fix. Yes there are. But if you are only gaming, sending mails, writing office documents and browsing the web, you won’t even notice. However, if you are a database admin or running DNS servers or Enterprise Clouds – anything with many “context switches” between userland and kernel space, then you’re likely to suffer from performance loss..
- The whole story may even become an #intelgate, because rumors have it that Intel had prior knowledge and some strange things going on with testing. Rumors, nothing more, except for a CEO selling most of his Intel stock in November and a flaw that makes systems 30-50% faster, but for what a price?
Justmy2cents.