AMD Zen 3 CPUs Vulnerable To Spectre-like Attacks via PSF Feature

'US chipmaker AMD advised customers last week to disable a new performance feature if they plan to use CPUs for sensitive operations, as this feature is vulnerable to Spectre-like side-channel attacks.
From a report: Called
Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF), this feature was added to AMD CPUs part of the company's Zen 3 core architecture, a processor series dedicated to gaming and high-performance computing, which launched in November 2020. The feature implements a technique called speculative execution, which works by running multiple alternative CPU operations in advance to make results available faster, and then discarding "predicted" data once deemed unneeded.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/04/02/1721241 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
participants (1)
-
Peter Reutemann