The privacy imposed by Intel still surrounds many details of the Meltdown and Specter vulnerabilities that have caused and continue to cause problems globally.
It is known that information about vulnerabilities security που ανακαλύπτονται διατηρούνται υπό άκρα μυστικότητα, μέχρις ότου κυκλοφορήσει κάποια νέα information code. It is a mature and well understood process.
But in the case of Meltdown and Specter, things did not go as expected.
"Normally, we have schedules and we fully disclose what happened," said Jonathan Corbet, who maintains documentation for the Linux kernel and is a member of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board.
"In this case, there is still a lot of secrecy about Meltdown and Specter and how they can be managed."
Jess Frazelle, who works in open source, and containers for Linux at Microsoft, said at the linux.conf.au open-source software conference in Sydney on Wednesday:
"There are people who have publicly stated at this conference that they are not even allowed to name these vulnerabilities," Corbett said, referring to Intel's Casey Schaufler.
Schaufler presented a discussion on the future of security in the Linux kernel, but was barred from mentioning even the most important problem in producthis company's from the bug Pentium FDIV which was a generation ago.
Could vulnerabilities such as Meltdown and Specter be detected faster if manufacturers move to more open architectures, projects that could be repaired more directly by software communities?
Hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang believes this:
"Unfortunately, I think in the case of this particular error, all the components that were necessary for it to happen were published," but he is generally convinced that open hardware can help find other errors.
But the problem is purely profit:
Huang said it would be interesting to see what is happening with Intel, as the Pentium FDIV error cost them 475 million dollars 1994.
On the other hand, Huang wondered if this secrecy eventually helped.
“What are you trying to protect the entrance from? You try to make sure that random young scripters don't use it vulnerability; Ή κοιτάζεις να κρατήσεις τους κρατικούς hackers away; .. If you're really trying to protect against, say, government hackers, those guys might already be listening in on your communications and would know about the vulnerability the same time you did.”
