Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
> I don’t know if Intel could have forseen the problem. Since some similar exploits have been discovered for AMD and ARM CPUs, the answer is probably “no”.<p>the answer is they probably both should have.<p>speculatively executing code that is time-sensitive to privileged data should have been caught. timing attacks on this level have been known for at least a decade. for that reason I don't quite believe that nobody at Intel (or AMD) was aware of the possibility of these attacks before anyone in the security industry published about it. they should have been more responsible instead of just waiting until it broke.<p>everything about this saga adds up to economics, business and production reasons why 1) not enough people were paid to look for these kind of problems, 2) the microcode developers that might have become aware of potential issues didn't have a good avenue to raise them, 3) there seems to have been NO proper roadmap whatsoever at both of these (rather large) companies for responsibly addressing, fixing and patching mistakes of this level. the whole response seems to be completely <i>ad hoc</i>, like it was some kind of one-in-a-million act-of-god thing that nobody could have foreseen.<p>it's not a super obscure bug. it's a <i>side channel cache timing attack</i>, the likes of which have been well-known for over a decade.<p>if Intel and AMD both thought, during the past decade, "well we know about side channel cache timing attacks now, and this is probably the worst they'll ever get", they don't know quite an important rule about security: exploits only get worse, never better. that inaction definitely doesn't fall under "could not have foreseen".