10-04-2019, 09:14 AM
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-...40529.html
Quote:Intel recently published a paper detailing a proposal for a new type of CPU memory that would mitigate against speculative execution side-channel attacks, including Spectre-class vulnerabilities.
ntel’s STrategic Offensive Research & Mitigations (STORM) team came up with the proposal for the new Speculative-Access Protected Memory (SAPM) feature that Intel is still researching. The idea is that SAPM would replace existing CPU memory with a more secure memory standard that would be resilient against Spectre-class attacks, including security vulnerabilities like Meltdown, Foreshadow, MDS, SpectreRSB and Spoiler.
STORM's research paper, published last week, said that development of SAMP is only at the "theory and possible implementation options" level. In other words, there’s no concrete idea that Intel and other CPU makers can implement right away; there still needs to be a significant amount of testing before it can become a viable CPU feature.
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According to Intel’s researchers, incorporating SAPM would hurt Intel chips' performance; however, the impact would be less than that of all the software patches implmented so far.
"Although the performance cost for each memory access to SAPM is relatively big, considering such operations shall only be a very small portion of the total software execution, the overall performance overhead is expected to be low and potentially less than the performance impact of current mitigations," the paper says.