BranchScope: Here we go again with the Spectre like attacks

[scaryjim]

Perhaps we finally found a use case for the Itanium. Or perhaps we aren't *that* desperate

Have to admit I've always been kind of curious about how Itanium actually performed in the wild, although I think its long, drawn-out death rattle gives a fairly good indication....

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Another vulnerability has apparently appeared:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/co...otal_meltdown/
https://blog.frizk.net/2018/03/total-meltdown.html

Did you think Meltdown was bad? Unprivileged applications being able to read kernel memory at speeds possibly as high as megabytes per second was not a good thing.

Meet the Windows 7 Meltdown patch from January. It stopped Meltdown but opened up a vulnerability way worse ... It allowed any process to read the complete memory contents at gigabytes per second, oh - it was possible to write to arbitrary memory as well.

No fancy exploits were needed. Windows 7 already did the hard work of mapping in the required memory into every running process. Exploitation was just a matter of read and write to already mapped in-process virtual memory. No fancy APIs or syscalls required - just standard read and write!

[Blaineoliver]

My work still has two itanium boxes that are 'running', we do not like it when customers, who still use it!!!, want support.

[DanceswithUnix]

Have to admit I've always been kind of curious about how Itanium actually performed in the wild, although I think its long, drawn-out death rattle gives a fairly good indication....

I used one once. The hard drive failed, usually not a big thing, but in this case we just shrugged and whilst no-one would throw it away we left it turned off. It was OK, but for that money you expect rather more than just "OK".