Meltdown

After the intel Meltdown exploit, what steps are you taking to mitigate the fallout/vector? As of today, intel isn't issuing a recall. What AMD laptops does Lainchan recommend for hackers?

I don't think you can recall all the CPUs for the past 10 years lain. Also the software patches are already coming out

AMD CPUs are vulnerable to this too. There are no good AMD laptops that don't try to look like piece of Chinese plastic crap with 768p TN display in current year. AMD processors are heavily underpowered on the GPU side as well. I hope you'd enjoy Nehalem era codec support at glorious 720p while most Intel Celerons from last gen can play 4k h.265 no problem. Go back to 8chan.

>>7065 Don't let Intel's™ PR message confuse you. AMD laptops are not susceptible to Meltdown. There are two separate bugs: Spectre and Meltdown. All CPUs are susceptible to Spectre, but only Intel® CPUs are susceptible to Meltdown. Meltdown is far worse and cannot be fixed with the OS patches or a microcode update because what causes it is the very architecture of Intel© CPUs.

>>7066 >Meltdown is far worse and cannot be fixed with the OS patches or a microcode update because what causes it is the very architecture of Intel© CPUs. Spectre is the one that is not a straightforward fix and affects all modern CPUs. There are fixes available for Meltdown because it is just Intel doing something retarded and AMD knew better. https://meltdownattack.com/#faq-fix >What AMD laptops does Lainchan recommend for hackers? AMD doesn't generally make non-server chips with virtualization extensions so their laptops are pretty lame for sophisticated users. http://groups.google.com/group/qubes-devel/msg/6412170cfbcb4cc5

>>7067 Containers are better than VMs anyway.

>>7067 I stand corrected.

ARM is affected too and I don't understand how that's even possible.

>>7065 >There are no good AMD laptops... fair enough >AMD processors are heavily underpowered on the GPU side as well I guess this is why intel decided to partner with AMD to make a CPU with AMD graphics? Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA! https://www.anandtech.com/show/12207/intel-with-radeon-rx-vega-graphics-core-i78809g-with-31-ghz-base-100w-target-tdp-overclockable Also pic incredibly related

>>7067 >AMD doesn't generally make non-server chips with virtualization extensions No, it's Intel that does the choose-virtualization-or-overclock scam. I'm not sure on the specifics of which processors have it, but at least my ryzen 7 has amd-v and so did my old piledriver CPU. You do need a not-absolute-cheapest motherboard though.

>>7070 >Containers are better than VMs anyway. Containers share a kernel with the host so they can't be used to run different operating systems.

-disable JS by default -don't download and use any software not signed by someone who has a good standing within the community(or, better yet, trust within a WoT)

>>7062 >As of today, intel isn't issuing a recall As I understand it, no recall is needed. They just need an operating system/kernel update to patch up the vuln. The bad press is because this patch also significantly decreases performance for some types of programs.

>>7079 >You do need a not-absolute-cheapest motherboard though. B350 is still better than any intel motherboards at the same price tho, and includes every feature you'd want other than SLI/XFire not being on all b350 mobo's

Wonder if POWER9 is affected?

>>7143 intel atom n450 is affected?

>>7062 Quick rundown on how to get the latest Microcode on Windows for old CPUs: Microsoft is unlikely going to release a OS-based firmware, and the VMWare tool loads the firmware too late. This guide is largely applicable to Desktops. Modding laptops is not recommended, but techniques are similar. 1) Ensure your CPU is at least Ivy Bridge-E/EP, Ivy Bridge-EX(IvyTown) or Haswell. Older CPUs does not receive the new microcode (yet or never). 2) Think twice before modding your BIOS if you are running Haswell/Broadwell due to the reboot problem. 3) Proceed to win-raid forums to download UBU, and MMTool 5.0.0.7 (regardless of whether your Aptio is V4 or V5). MMTool have to be downloaded from external sources. The CRC32 hash of the program is 614319D4. 4) Move the MMTool application into the UBU folder. 5) Proceed to read warning/additional steps if you are on the X99 platform. Anyway, refer to Step 2. 6) Proceed to download the UEFI file and extract it. Place the firmware into the directory of the UBU. For .CAP files, you need to use the corresponding DOS flash program or Asus USB Flashback to flash because they are protected unlike .ROM files. 7) Run the UBU and select 7. Afterwards, select 1 twice. The tool automatically updates the firmware and rename it appropriately for you; there is no need to download anything from Intel. 8) Proceed to read "[Guide] How to flash a modded ASUS-ASRock-Gigabyte AMI UEFI BIOS" in the win-raid forums to load the modded BIOS into the motherboard. For Asus Flashback button, there is an error if the button only flash for ~5 seconds. 9) Start(Asus Flashback Button)/Restart the computer(DOS flash). The computer will now either fail to POST or boot up with the new Microcode. If you have a SPI flasher or Asus Flashback button, you can retry. 10) Run get-speculationcontrolsettings and you should see all greens. I recommend you download your firmware twice, and run both on the tool. Afterwards compare the hashes to check for corruption.

>>7232 >1) Ensure your CPU is at least Ivy Bridge-E/EP, Ivy Bridge-EX(IvyTown) or Haswell. Older CPUs does not receive the new microcode (yet or never). I hope Intel releases microcode for older CPUs. I just realized pretty much all my computers are compromised with Meltdown, and I don't want to retire any of them right now. The only computer that should be somewhat safe is a Thinkpad x100e I've randomly bought and fixed which has a single core AMD processor, which is by far the slowest machine I have around.

>>7254 >pretty much all my computers are compromised with Meltdown, and I don't want to retire any of them right now. There are patches that mitigate meltdown at the OS level.

Has anything even remotely interesting been done with meltdown/spectre? I know there's a javascript implementation somewhere but as far as I understand this thing the hacker would still need to know the memory layout in order to extract data.

>>7254 If I'm not mistaken, the patches for Meltdown are OS-based. Spectre can only be patched through microcode updates (like BIOS/firmware updates) from Intel and/or your system's manufacturer. Spectre will only be "fixed" for Ivy Bridge processors and onward. If you use ThinkPads, that means that only the xx30 series like the T430 and X230 will receive the firmware updates next month. https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/len-18282

>>7263 microcode updates can be loaded by the os as well, there's a package on debian for example

>>7254 >>7263 >fixes From what I understand, Meltdown is a bug in Intel CPUs which deferred privileged checking to get better performance. It has been mitigated at the OS level but there is a large performance cost. Microcode fixes will reduce the performance cost. Future versions of the processor should remove the bug and the performance cost associated with fixing it in microcode/operating system. Spectre is not a bug it's just how modern CPUs work. Mitigations are a matter of writing and compiling code in a different way to make it harder to exploit. That's why the focus of Sprectre is on toolchains (GCC, LLVM) and high profile applications (Chrome, Firefox). I hope this makes the discussion clearer and shout if I got anything wrong.