Meltdown & Spectre Impacts On Cloud Servers, Google fixed it

It gets even Worse and worse in the clouds. Now that you think of all cloud platforms that are having the same CPU flaws we originally thought was bounded to consumer products. If you use cloud you need to be worried about the securities and access all the time, but this time google fixed it before it gets out there in the hands of hackers. Google says that it wasn’t Meltdown that had the greatest impact on its cloud servers and systems but Spectre Variant 2. To fix it, the company created Retpoline, a software-only solution that regular users unfortunately can’t benefit from.

Meet Meltdown & Spectre Google's Project Zero

Meet Meltdown & Spectre Google’s Project Zero

Unlike many had predicted, Meltdown, Intel-only vulnerability is fixed by forcing the CPUs to reload its TLB when running a kernel process, and seems that is was not the biggest headache for Google. Google goes into details on the impact of Meltdown/Spectre on Google apps’ backend, Google said that, because of the long amount of time they had known about Meltdown and time they had to fix it, “extensive performance tuning work” it was made possible that by the time they deployed the patch for it in October, the “protections caused no perceptible impact in [its] cloud.”

But the real headache for Google seems to be Spectre Variant 2 among the three flaws. As Tomshardware reported;:T

he hardware fix was to outright disable some forms of speculative execution in the CPU, rather than just nullify them in the situations that matter, which is what the fix for Meltdown does. The performance impact of this was significant.

Google explained:

Not only did we see considerable slowdowns for many applications, we also noticed inconsistent performance, since the speed of one application could be impacted by the behavior of other applications running on the same core. Rolling out these mitigations would have negatively impacted many customers.

Google ended up with a software-only solution that avoided any hardware change and caused “almost no performance loss.” Being the obvious only solution, Retpoline was deployed across Google’s infrastructure and shared with others. Spectre Variant 2 is the one for which we need BIOS fixes. For closed systems running proprietary software, which is what the Google apps’ backend is, Retpoline is the ultimate solution. As a result, to secure against Spectre Variant 2, user systems have to be patched on the hardware level. Now we don’t know specifically what the BIOS fixes that Intel, and now AMD, are pushing out do, but, from what Google says, we assume that they disable some forms of speculative execution.

Tags: Technology, cpu flaws, intel cpu flaws, meltdown, spectre, Meltdown Spectre Fix, Meltdown Spectre , Meltdown Spectre  cloud servers

Mohsen Daemi
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