Unsafe or Slow: These are the options for those who have a slightly older Intel CPU. Therefore, a major lawsuit is underway.

In the USA there is a so-called class actionLawsuit against Intel because of the downfall bug. This is a major lawsuit filed on behalf of a collective of victims. In this case, owners of 6th to 11th generation Intel chips can participate, as these chips are vulnerable to the recently discovered downfall bug.

Cannot be solved without a dip

Downfall is a vulnerability that exploits speculative execution in the CPU and can be viewed as a spiritual successor to Spectre. The error is due to the way the processor handles instructions and is therefore not easy to fix. That’s where the shoe pinches: Intel supplies a patch, but it doesn’t remain without consequences.

To rule out the bug, Intel needs to limit speculative execution in the CPU. Speculative execution is a feature where a chip (very efficiently) predicts which instruction to load before a previous instruction has completed. This saves considerable time. The patch limits this capacity so that the performance of affected chips drops by up to 39 percent after an update, depending on the load. Intel itself speaks of a possible loss of performance of up to 50 percent.

Pay a lot for less performance

There is no good solution for owners of the chips: either you leave the CPU’s back door open to abuse, or you close it, but actually embark on a serious downgrade of the CPU. That’s what the victims hate. They want compensation from Intel.

The plausible idea is that customers buy a CPU with certain expectations of performance and pay a certain amount for it. Now the power suddenly melts away or a leak remains active. The plaintiffs are therefore hoping for compensation through the lawsuit.

On the other hand, we should note the so-called side channelAttacks are not easy to carry out. In addition, there are other defense mechanisms that customers can use to keep attackers away from their systems. The question is to what extent customers can trust that their chips are immune to this. Intel has never lied about the security of its chips and has done its best to make them as waterproof as possible. For the lawsuit, an important question is whether Intel is at fault here.