Author here if anyone has questions.
I'm curious about the circuitry that drives the difference between "minimum" and "maximum" modes from the processor - another Intel pin-saving strategy. Is there basically an 8288 sitting in a corner of the 8086 die, or are things more complicated than that?
Put another way, if you could, recursively, delete all the gates in the 8086 which only exist to drive minimum-mode pins, would any remnant of the minimum-mode signals remain for other internal uses?
My best guess is it for placing memory or state between the registers and the processing units. Or perhaps some subtlety of this as registers are already memory or state. I could not figure it out.
Modern patents are especially prone to this. They try to claim as much as possible while avoiding publishing any trade secrets. The result tends toward a unreadable mess.
Where they go and mention that the attackers went ahead and built their own simulator of a CPU as part of their attack vector. Do you know what they emulated and would you have more details on that specific hack ?
I think the authors promised to come back with a part 2 eventually but so far they haven't