this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
970 points (99.0% liked)

Technology

59675 readers
3206 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Oh no.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 204 points 1 year ago (39 children)

Intel claims most consumer software shouldn’t see much impact, outside of image and video editing workloads..

But that's, like the one place other than games where consumers are looking for performance. What's left, web browsing and MS Office?

[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (34 children)

I just skimmed through the article and it seems like this vulnerability is only really meaningful on multi-user systems. It allows one user to access memory dedicated to other users, letting them read stuff they shouldn't. I would expect that most consumer gaming computers are single-user machines, or only have user accounts for trusted family members and whatnot, so if this mitigation causes too much of a performance hit I expect it won't be a big risk to turn it off for those particular computers.

[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Would it mean that a malicious application being run in non-admin mode by one user could see data/memory in use by an admin user?

[–] OverambitiousNewbie 87 points 1 year ago

It would indeed imply that which is why this vulnerability is also serious for single user contexts.

The vulnerability is caused by memory optimization features in Intel processors that unintentionally reveal internal hardware registers to software. This allows untrusted software to access data stored by other programs, which should not normally be accessible.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (32 replies)
load more comments (36 replies)