I find analysis like this thoroughly fascinating. I wonder if the handful of Intel engineers who presumably crafted this would ever stumble into this post. Would they be impressed, or alarmed that someone is probing such a crucial mechanism?
Having talked with some Intel engineers about their microcode, they consider it a company secret that protects trade secrets about how their processors function and wouldn't say much of anything about it.
I suspect they would be slightly impressed that someone was able to find out as much as they did, but I don't think they would be overly surprised. I also suspect they would also be satisfied that this doesn't disclose anything sensitive about the contents of the microcode updates and just found out some information about the mechanism.
They definitely wouldn't be surprised that someone was probing microcode updates. A lot of us have asked them about it and they know people are interested about what's going on inside those blobs.
> I wonder if the handful of Intel engineers who presumably crafted this would ever stumble into this post.
They almost certainly will if they haven't already.
Yup, a lot of folks at the office enjoy skimming hacker news, ars technica etc. The number of people capable of actually signing microcode even in a company of 100,000+ is pretty darn small though.
You'd actually be surprised about how much effort goes into hardening things against attacks like those these days (timing attacks, differential power analysis etc). There's a lot of interesting work around on the best ways of mitigating those risks.
