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To: Vattila who wrote (35680)	3/8/2020 12:53:12 PM
From: Vattila	Respond to of 73990

Here is AMD's response to the "Take A Way" vulnerability: "We are aware of a new white paper that claims potential security exploits in AMD CPUs, whereby a malicious actor could manipulate a cache-related feature to potentially transmit user data in an unintended way. The researchers then pair this data path with known and mitigated software or speculative execution side channel vulnerabilities. AMD believes these are not new speculation-based attacks." amd.com Comments from Tom's Hardware: "It's noteworthy that this advisory does not point to any mitigations for the attack in question, merely citing other mitigated speculative executions that were used as a vehicle to attack the L1D cache predictor. The researchers also used other methods to exploit the vulnerability, so the advisory is a bit nebulous. AMD's posting also lists general advice for protecting against the incredibly large family of side channel attacks, but we can't find any specific mention of firmware patches for the Take A Way vulnerabilities. We're reached out to AMD for more clarity, including if there are any publicly available firmwares that specifically mitigate the newly-disclosed vulnerabilities." tomshardware.com I guess AMD needs to provide some further clarification on this. For what it is worth, this research was, in part, funded by Intel. "While Hardware Unboxed found disclosures that Intel funded the research, raising concerns about the objectivity of the study, the authors have also received backing from Intel (and other sources) for finding flaws in the company's own chips as well as other products. It appears to just be a general effort to spur security research, then. As it stands, the funding source doesn't change the practical reality — AMD may have to tweak its CPU designs to safeguard against Take A Way attacks going forward." engadget.com