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Saint TAA, Who Aborted to Reveal the Secrets
Patron of TSX transactional memory, the CPU's internal buffers, and everyone who had just patched for MDS.
Life
On 12 November 2019 VUSec and Intel revealed TAA, TSX Asynchronous Abort: when a TSX transaction was aborted abruptly, the processor could leak, through speculative execution, leftover data in its internal buffers, the same ones hit by the MDS attacks. From an unprivileged program one could thus peek at other processes' data. The safest defence was to disable TSX entirely (CVE-2019-11135).
Prayer
O Saint TAA, who aborts the transaction and lets the secrets fall, let our buffers not empty into the wrong hands. Amen.
How to celebrate
Celebrated by updating the microcode and, where performance allows, disabling TSX.
Aborted transaction, escaped secret.