Keynote: MDS, Fallout, Zombieland, and Linux
summary
Describes the MDS family (Ridl, Fallout, Zombieland variants) as Intel CPU speculative‑execution bugs that leak data and require both update kernel and BIOS and sometimes disable hyper-threading to be safe; kernel fix is to flush the CPU buffers on context switch, which works but causes measurable slowdowns (example ~15% on some workloads). Notes cloud providers pick performance over security, CVE tagging is unreliable, and Google audited 218 issues finding 92% already fixed in LTS kernels.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction to MDS
- 0:39Understanding CPU bugs
- 1:46The nature of MDS flaws
- 2:40Mitigation and SMT risks
- 4:16The role of OpenBSD
- 5:10Riddle and data leakage
- 6:16Fallout and Zombieland
- 7:18Performance versus security
- 9:09Practical performance impact
- 10:52Choosing hardware providers
- 11:58Coordination and disclosure
- 13:45The reality of CVEs
- 16:30Best practices for security
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