Top Linux developer on Intel chip security problems: 'They're not going away.'

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, could have prefaced hisOpen Source Summit Europekeynote speech, MDS, Fallout, Zombieland, and Linux, by paraphrasing Winston Churchill: I have nothing to offer but blood sweat and tears for dealing with Intel CPU's security problems.

Or as a Chinese developer told him recently about these problems: "This is a sad talk." The sadness is that the same Intel CPU speculative execution problems, which led toMeltdown and Spectresecurity issues, are alive and well and causing more trouble.

The problem with how Intel designed speculative execution is that, while anticipating the next action for the CPU to take does indeed speed things up, it also exposes data along the way. That's bad enough on your own server, but when it breaks down the barriers between virtual machines (VM)s in cloud computing environments, it's a security nightmare.

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