OpenBSD will disable Hyper-Threading support in Intel CPU due to security concerns
Do Son Due to concerns about more Spectre variant vulnerabilities, the OpenBSD project announced that it plans to disable Hyper-Threading support for Intel CPUs. Hyper-Threading is an Intel proprietary implementation of simultaneous multi-threading technology that allows the processor to perform concurrent operations on different CPU cores. The Intel processor has added this feature since 2002 and enabled by default. The chip giant claims it can improve performance.
But now Mark Kettenis of the OpenBSD project said that the project is removing Hyper-Threading support from Intel CPUs because hyper-threading technology has opened the door to more timing attacks.
“[Intel HT] can make cache timing attacks a lot easier and we strongly suspect that this will make several spectre-class bugs exploitable.“
OpenBSD will provide settings to turn off Hyper-Threading support because modern machines no longer provide the option to turn off Hyper-Threading in the BIOS settings.
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