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ASUS Provides BIOS updates addressing MDS vulnerabilities, ZombieLoad, RIDL, and Fallout

ASUS is aware that a new sub-class of speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs, called Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), also known as ZombieLoad, RIDL, and Fallout, may allow information disclosure. Intel states that selected 8th and 9th Generation Intel Core processors, as well as the 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor family, are not vulnerable to MDS. If you are using one of these processors, no further action is necessary.

For other Intel processors, ASUS is working closely with Intel to provide a solution in a forthcoming BIOS update. We recommend owners of affected products update both the BIOS and operating system as soon as these mitigations are available. Please find our first-wave model list below and download the appropriate BIOS update from the ASUS Support website. More details, including affected systems, will be added to this document as they become available.

Intel Puts Out Benchmarks Showing Minimal Performance Impact of MDS Mitigation

Intel Tuesday once again shook the IT world by disclosing severe microarchitecture-level security vulnerabilities affecting its processors. The Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) class of vulnerabilities affect Intel CPU architectures older than "Coffee Lake" to a greater extent. Among other forms of mitigation software patches, Intel is recommending that users disable HyperThreading technology (HTT), Intel's simultaneous multithreading (SMT) implementation. This would significantly deplete multi-threaded performance on older processors with lower core-counts, particularly Core i3 2-core/4-thread chips.

On "safer" microarchitectures such as "Coffee Lake," though, Intel is expecting a minimal impact of software patches, and doesn't see any negative impact of disabling HTT. This may have something to do with the 50-100 percent increased core-counts with the 8th and 9th generations. The company put out a selection of benchmarks relevant to client and enterprise (data-center) use-cases. On the client use-case that's we're more interested in, a Core i9-9900K machine with software mitigation and HTT disabled is negligibly slower (within 2 percent) of a machine without mitigation and HTT enabled. Intel's selection of benchmarks include SYSMark 2014 SE, WebXprt 3, SPECInt rate base (1 copy and n copies), and 3DMark "Skydiver" with the chip's integrated UHD 630 graphics. Comparing machines with mitigations applied but toggling HTT presents a slightly different story.

Yet Another Speculative Malfunction: Intel Reveals New Side-Channel Attack, Advises Disabling Hyper-Threading Below 8th, 9th Gen CPUs

Ouch doesn't even begin to describe how much that headline hurt. As far as speculative execution goes, it's been well covered by now, but here's a refresher. Speculative execution essentially means that your CPU tries to think ahead of time on what data may or may not be needed, and processes it before it knows it's needed. The objective is to take advantage of concurrency in the CPU design, keeping processing units that would otherwise be left idle to process and deliver results on the off-chance that they are indeed required by the system: and when they are called for, the CPU saves time by not having to process them on the fly and already having them available.

The flaws have been announced by Intel in coordination with Austrian university TU Graz, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Michigan, the University of Adelaide, KU Leuven in Belgium, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Saarland University in Germany and security firms Cyberus, BitDefender, Qihoo360 and Oracle. While some of the parties involved have named the four identified flaws with names such as "ZombieLoad", "Fallout", and RIDL, or "Rogue In-Flight Data Load", Intel is using the PEGI-13 "Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)" name.
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Dec 22nd, 2024 02:56 EST change timezone

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