Hmmm, is the digital cat out of the virtual bag in the secretive world of microprocessors?
Two new technology bugs, known as Spectre and Meltdown, have arrived on the scene. Rather sounds to me like a plot for the next Mission Impossible movie. Ethan Hunt enters the matrix to apprehend digital villains.
Being as jaded as I am in this area, I am inclined to respond to the news with “Yeah, so what else is new?” I know not to open e-mails from people I do not know or to click on links in e-mails that are in any manner suspicious. Flu season is year round in the digital world.
But there is something especially disturbing about these latest viruses. I am give to understand that they exploit a design flaw that apparently has existed in computer chips for years – and they affect every computer device including laptops, BlackBerrys and servers.
If I understand correctly – and I probably do not, but I will stumble on anyway – programs are usually isolated from each other and the operating system. But this design flaw allows viruses to break that isolation. And that is bad – Lex Luthor level bad.
I envision a microscopic bridge inside my computer that the virus can waltz across willy-nilly. Yes, I know willy-nilly is not a technical term. Then again, maybe it is. How would I know? And would I even care, if I did know? Probably not, but I digress.
It seems that the chip companies have known about this vulnerability but choose to turn a blind eye. Hmmm, blind eye. Great name for a computer virus. Copyright pending.
I have learned that modern, high-performance processors perform something called speculative execution. They make assumptions and speculatively compute results accordingly. It worries me to no end that my computer is speculating. It makes it seem actually alive and capable of going rogue in the matrix and attacking me.
But images of killer computers aside, if they guess correctly, they win some extra performance. But what happens when they guess wrong? They throw away their speculatively calculated results and start over.
All of this is meant to be transparent to programs. A well-kept cyber secret. But somehow this speculation slightly changes the state of the processor. These small changes can be detected which results in the disclosing of information about the data and instructions that were used speculatively. Translation: the digital cat gets out of the virtual bag.
And this too is bad. Or at least not good – or somewhere in-between good and bad, although how wide that spectrum is in digital terms I cannot speculate.
Computer virus is, of course, a metaphor. A metaphor gone wrong, it would seem. But I do not see the point of blaming the metaphor. It is just an innocent bystander in this speculative world of virtual right and wrong.
It must be Bill Gates who is to blame. Or Mark Zuckerberg. Or the guy who invented Google. Or all three of them together in a digital ménage a trois. Of course, that is purely speculation on my part.
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Tags: Bill Gates · computer virus · Mark Zuckerberg · Meltdown · metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · Spectre · speculative computing · The MatrixNo Comments