Back in May 2019, we informed you about a new security vulnerability that affected Intel’s CPUs, Spoiler. And today, a brand new security vulnerability has been discovered that, once again, affects only Intel CPUs and is called RIDL.
RIDL can be used to attacks victims and computers with Intel CPUs are vulnerable to this thread. Phones and tablets are unaffected by this, and neither laptops and desktop PC configurations that are using AMD’s processors.
Regarding RIDL, VUSec’s Pietro Frigo claimed that a quick fix – at this point – is to disable Hyper Threading.
“If you disable hyperthreading and at the same time you use Intel’s proposed mitigation (that is, using the very instruction) the MDS vulnerabilities are mitigated on old Intel processors.”
Now I don’t know whether it’s possible to fix this issue via a new firmware, and whether this software will bring any performance hit on Intel’s CPUs. After all, the firmware/software updates did impact the overall gaming performance on Intel’s CPUs (not by a large margin thankfully).
It’s also interesting pointing out that AMD CPUs are unaffected by both RIDL and Spoiler. From the looks of it, AMD currently offers processors that are not affected by a lot of security vulnerabilities so kudos to the red team.
Thanks Guru3D
UPDATE:
Alongside RIDL, ZombieLoad, Fallout and Store-to-Leak Forwarding are three more Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) attacks that target a CPU’s microarchitectural data structures. All these four security vulnerabilities affect Intel’s CPUs.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email