Intel Faces Lawsuit Over Inaction on Insecure AVX Chips, Surprising Revelation Emerges
Intel is facing a lawsuit from PC buyers who claim that the company knew about the vulnerability of its AVX instruction set to side-channel attacks since 2018 but failed to fix the defect until the disclosure of the Downfall vulnerability this year. The lawsuit alleges that Intel sold billions of insecure chips during this period, leaving affected computer buyers with no choice but to apply a patch that slows performance by up to 50%. Downfall is a microarchitectural flaw that allows the extraction of sensitive information from memory during speculative execution. The plaintiffs argue that Intel should have secured AVX back in 2018 but failed to do so, leading to the discovery of Downfall five years later.