[13609] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Potentially dangerous Pentium bug disc
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael McArthur)
Wed Nov 12 10:52:34 1997
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 10:42:30 -0500 (EST)
From: Michael McArthur <mcarthur@ans.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <19971111224017.04961@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us>
On Tue, 11 Nov 1997, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> Date: 09 Nov 1997 09:26:39 +0100
> From: Torsten Hilbrich <Torsten.Hilbrich@bln.de>
> Subject: New Pentium flaw
>
> Yesterday (Nov, 8) I found the following information on the news-ticker
> page of the German Heise-Verlag (shortened to the essential information):
>
> > The Pentium in standard and MMX version halts on execution of the
> > instruction:
> > F0 0F C7 C8
> > This code sequence works independent of any memory protection of the
> > operating system.
>
> I was able to reproduce this bug on a Pentium 133 system with the following
> operating systems: DOS, Windows 95, Linux 2.0.31, and FreeBSD 2.2.x.
>
> I don't know about PentiumPro and Pentium II.
>
> The risk? Every pentium based server with user access for executing
> programs can be crashed using this code sequence. Not to mention Trojan
> Horses or Active-X controls.
Does anybody know if this affects the Cyrix and AMD "Pentium
Clone" chips?
