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Comment by sounds | Hacker News Reader

Well, just for one:

Spectre affects almost all CPUs. It affects ARM CPUs.

But Meltdown only affects x86 CPUs. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili...

Maybe Intel used such an old core design in their baseband that it's not affected? Nah, that'd just be too good to be true.

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Your source that Meltdown only afects x86 CPUs literally starts with "Meltdown is a hardware vulnerability affecting Intel x86 microprocessors, IBM POWER processors, and some ARM-based microprocessors.[1][2][3]" and that iOS needed to be patched.

Also worth noting AMD x86 CPUs were not affected. Meltdown was definitely more a "how good was your implementation" question not a "are you x86" question.

Can you describe a situation where an adversary would be able to run user code on a phone's baseband processor? This is a serious question - I don't know anything about smartphones. Do apps have access to the baseband processor? As an uninformed bystander I would think not...

It might be possible to find and exploit a buffer overflow by impersonating a cell phone tower. Not exactly trivial to pull off, but certainly not a priori impossible.

This comment is down-voted as other archs are vulnerable to Spectre/Meltdown not just x86. True.

Yet, as of right now Intel as not fixed in silicon all spectre/meltdown issues. Given the R&D / QA time on a specific arch, I'd bet it is still hardware flawed if they took an of the shelf in house x86 design. Atom based maybe?

So I do not feel confident for a chip that runs the broadband and moreover one that is not auditable by the end user (unlike a main CPU would be).

I would be supper interested in knowing if the reverse engineering show traces of retpolines.

It looks strongly like a quark, in which case it's not vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown. That core is fundamentally a 486 and doesn't do the kind of speculation behind these vulnerabilities.

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