Vintage CPUs doing OK with Meltdown/Spectre
I just wanted to report my 68020 powered Amiga 1200 is surfing the web securely despite the new vulnerabilities.. My 68000 based Mega STE with NIC also seemed unaffected. I haven't dialed any BBSes lately on my Atari 800XL, but I'm pretty confident that machine is safe too. I felt these were pretty risky as they are "modern" machines with complex custom chips, but they seem to be doing OK. So far I haven't heard of any floppy virus variants of Meltdown/Spectre. I hope everyone else has vintage machines available to survive the security apocalypse this year :)
On 1/14/2018 9:04 AM, John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I just wanted to report my 68020 powered Amiga 1200 is surfing the web securely despite the new vulnerabilities.. My 68000 based Mega STE with NIC also seemed unaffected.
I haven't dialed any BBSes lately on my Atari 800XL, but I'm pretty confident that machine is safe too.
I felt these were pretty risky as they are "modern" machines with complex custom chips, but they seem to be doing OK. So far I haven't heard of any floppy virus variants of Meltdown/Spectre.
I hope everyone else has vintage machines available to survive the security apocalypse this year :)
But the code I arranged to have embedded in all the Amiga terminal emulators long ago has silently transferred all your IFF files to me. Bwa ha ha ha haaaaaaaaa :O :) I like the sentiment. The thought that our vintage computers could come back to help us, in the face of some modern computer problem, as you are projecting here, is appealing to us in the hobby. Using old computers for a security reason has been used at least a few times as a TV and movie plot. I recall Leverage S03E02- The Reunion Job- featured a TRS-80 holding an access code or something, off line, so it couldn't be physically hacked. They had to use social hacking to get at it. Good stuff.
On 01/14/2018 09:04 AM, John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I just wanted to report my 68020 powered Amiga 1200 is surfing the web securely despite the new vulnerabilities.. My 68000 based Mega STE with NIC also seemed unaffected.
I haven't dialed any BBSes lately on my Atari 800XL, but I'm pretty confident that machine is safe too.
I felt these were pretty risky as they are "modern" machines with complex custom chips, but they seem to be doing OK. So far I haven't heard of any floppy virus variants of Meltdown/Spectre.
I hope everyone else has vintage machines available to survive the security apocalypse this year :)
This is funny. But I was wondering about older Sparc and MIPS chips. Like is my O2 safe? - Derrik -- -- Derrik Derrik Walker v2.0, RHCE dwalker@doomd.net "Those UNIX guys, they think weird!" -- John C. Dvorak
On 1/14/2018 10:17 AM, Derrik Walker v2.0 via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On 01/14/2018 09:04 AM, John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
[...] I hope everyone else has vintage machines available to survive the security apocalypse this year :)
This is funny. But I was wondering about older Sparc and MIPS chips. Like is my O2 safe?
Both Sparc and MIPS are immune to Meltdown. Meltdown leverages out of order execution to give user codes access to the *entirety* of physical by exploiting a particular problem with the way Intel (and only Intel, it seems, not even AMD) handles caching. I think I read somewhere that MIPS in particular is totally immune to this problem in all cases due to the way the architecture handles separating user space from kernel space memory. Spectre may yet be a problem for Sparc and MIPS and any other processors that do speculative execution, but that exploit only gives access to the memory in the user's space, not the entirety of memory. The famous proof of concept right now is JavaScript code run in Firefox that gives access to the user's stored password in the Firefox memory space. In all cases, though, you have to *run rogue code* to have a problem. JavaScript probably isn't a problem for MIPS and Sparc.. ahem.. and consider the effort it would require to create a binary that could exploit the problem *and* get the few people running Sparcs and MIPS to run it all just to access user space memory... I'm not too worried. -Adam
participants (4)
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Adam Michlin -
Derrik Walker v2.0 -
Douglas Crawford -
John Heritage