Chipmakers Discuss a Future After Meltdown and Spectre
Engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM discuss what lies ahead for engineers, and the chip industry in general, in the wake of the Meltdown and Spectre hardware bugs.
February 5, 2018
At a recent panel at DesignCon 2018, “Continued Innovation in a World Challenged by the Slowing of Moore's Law,” a group of engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM weighed in on the impact of Meltdown and Spectre chip hardware bugs and how they could impact the chip industry going forward.
Chipmakers did not begin 2018 on a high note. In early January, reports came flooding in of a pair of hardware vulnerabilities affecting CPUs going back as far as 20 years. The bugs, Meltdown and Spectre, were initially discovered by researchers at Google in June 2017, but information about them leaked to the public before a major fix for either could be implemented. This created a scramble not only by major chipmakers Intel, ARM, and AMD but also among big technology names like Apple, Microsoft, and Google to quickly fix the problems before they could become the latest tricks in malicious hackers' toolboxes. A repository has sprung up on Github that features several applications that demonstrate the Meltdown bug. Twitter user, Michael Schwarz, who holds a PhD in information security, demonstrated how easy it would be to steal passwords by exploiting Meltdown in short enough time to fill an animated gif.
Using #Meltdown to steal passwords in real time #intelbug #kaiser #kpti /cc @mlqxyz @lavados @StefanMangard @yuvalyarom https://t.co/gX4CxfL1Ax pic.twitter.com/JbEvQSQraP
— Michael Schwarz (@misc0110) January 4, 2018
What made these particular exploits so thorny is that rather than typical software issues, these were hardware bugs built right into the design of the chips themselves. According to an information site hosted by Graz University of Technology in Austria, Meltdown gets its name because it “basically melts security boundaries which are normally enforced by the hardware” and Spectre, though harder to exploit than Meltdown, gets its name because it is not an easy bug to fix and “it will haunt us for quite some time.”
At DesignCon 2018 (from L-R), Rory McInerney of Intel, Joe Macri of AMD, Rob Aitken of ARM, and moderator Bob O'Donnel of TECHnalysis discuss changes needed in the chip industry in the wake of Meltdown and Spectre. (Image source: Design News) |