INFRA Signal 419
Researchers report certain out-of-order RISC-V chips vulnerable to Spectre variants
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A new study shows commercial out-of-order RISC-V processors, including SiFive P550 and T-Head Xuantie C910/C920, are susceptible to all major Spectre attacks.
Engineers building security-critical systems on RISC-V must consider that existing Spectre mitigations for x86 and ARM may not apply, potentially exposing kernel secrets. The lack of hardware introspection and a unified mitigation strategy means additional software patches and custom barriers may be required to protect deployed devices.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
Out-of-order RISC-V chips SiFive P550 and T-Head Xuantie C910/C920 are vulnerable to Spectre-PHT, Spectre-BTB, Spectre-RSB and Spectre-STL.
In-order RISC-V chips such as SiFive U74 and Xuantie C906/C908 do not appear vulnerable in the study.
Three Linux patches have been merged and two are under review, while SiFive and T-Head are working on ad-hoc speculation barriers.
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