Questions tagged [cpu]
The cpu tag has no usage guidance.
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Is a "single" cpu safer than multiple cores?
Should I use the plain "bsd" or "bsd.mp" kernel if I need a safer operating system? eg.: against side-channel attacks.
Thinking of that even 2 physical core CPUs can share ...
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Which Intel CPUs do not have Management Engine (ME) [duplicate]
The Intel Management Engine (ME) is a security risk which I would prefer not to take. I do not trust it, it seems to be a backdoor, and there are reported vulnerabilities on it.
I do not trust the ...
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are new CPUs still vulnerable to attacks like Spectre and Meltdown?
Are the most modern CPUs still susceptible to attacks like Spectre and Meltdown?
Is it worth enabling the fixes in kernel (which hit performance) ?
Lets say high end laptop CPU such as the AMD Ryzen 7 ...
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TCP packets containing machine code
Is it possible that an attacker puts machine code on a TCP packet? In a way that before passing to the CPU and getting an error that such a function doesn't exist on the application, it first needs to ...
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What is the current risk regarding hyper-threading?
We are around four years after ZombieLoad.
We had multiple Microcode and OS mitigation patches.
Is enabling hyper-threading still bad practice if firmware, microcode and OS patches for your system are ...
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AMD SEV - attack through the hypervisor console
AMD SEV enables creating a trusted encrypted VM where the memory of the whole VM is encrypted using cryptographic keys and features on the CPU and thus not visible to the cloud provider (in theory if ...
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Does malware ever check CPUID?
CPUID is an instruction that identifies CPU type and features.
Has there ever been a case of either targeting or the opposite - ignoring of specific CPUIDs by malware in the wild?
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How to select a CPU to buy for the best security?
Various versions of Spectre, Meltdown, Foreshadow and ZombieLoad make it quite the jungle trip to navigate which CPUs are affected, how to mitigate them.
Right now, my problem is that I need a new ...
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What is the latest version of ThinkPad laptops that doesn't have Intel Management Engine or similar remote controller built-in?
I work in cybersecurity and would like to find an older laptop that doesn't have the Intel Management Engine built-in, while still able to run a Debian OS well.
I have an IBM ThinkPad t42 with 42T0273 ...
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Security considerations of x86 vs x64
What if any, are the security considerations of deciding to use an x64 vs x86 architecture?
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Feasibility of CPU Backdoors
Recently I was thinking of the feasibility of hardware backdoors in the CPU introduced by manufacturers at the behest of three letter agencies. I can think of two potential backdoors that seem ...
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Is it possible to extract encryption keys from software executing on your own system?
I'm a newbie in this field so forgive me in advance if this question is stupid in anyway.
Say we have a software that is executing on our system and encrypting files using a secret key that is not ...
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Can a custom built CPU break hard drive encryption?
While a hard drive is decrypted on boot up, can the original phrase be intercepted at some comparison calculation step by a specially built CPU or is there some higher math involved?
This would be ...
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Secure code makes exploitation easier with CPU vulnerabilities?
I researched CPU vulnerabilities in the past, such as Specter and Meltdown.
I read that one of those attacks is made easier if the code is a certain way. I cannot remember if it was related to being ...
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Would an anti-virus software make any other processes consume more CPU?
Would an anti-virus software make any other processes that it scans to consume more CPU?
We recently switched to a new Next-Gen, AI based Anti-Virus software. On couple of our Linux servers that runs ...