I'm not cynical. While maybe this exact attack was not public these types of side-channel attacks have been known for eons and the countermeasures were also known. Look at the speed at which Intel is now pushing new silicon fixes, that research didn't happen in a few months.Why so cynical?
Do you have evidence they knew these vulnerabilities existed years ago that they actively neglected to a) inform their customers and b) revise their new silicon?
Do you have evidence that they did not take security at the silicon level seriously until these exploits became known?
Do you think the NSA (and any other intelligence-based 3-letter acronym you can think of) did not review hardware security with their chosen vendors while developing their intelligence and data storage and access systems?
IMHO, Occum's razor applies here: the bad guys only need to be right once. The good guys -- 100% of the time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-inside-the-semiconductor-industry-s-meltdown
Prescher was one of at least 10 researchers and engineers working around the globe -- sometimes independently, sometimes together -- who uncovered Meltdown and Spectre. Interviews with several of these experts reveal a chip industry that, while talking up efforts to secure computers, failed to spot that a common feature of their products had made machines so vulnerable.
"It makes you shudder," said Paul Kocher, who helped find Spectre and started studying trade-offs between security and performance after leaving a full-time job at chip company Rambus Inc. last year. "The processor people were looking at performance and not looking at security." Kocher still works as an adviser to Rambus.
No Kidding, a 'major' for sure.Researchers began writing about the potential for security weaknesses at the heart of central processing units, or CPUs, at least as early as 2005. Yuval Yarom, at the University of Adelaide in Australia, credited with helping discover Spectre last week, penned some of this early work.
...
Despite Fogh’s encouragement, the Graz researchers still didn’t think attacks would ever work in practice. "That would be such a major f*ck-up by Intel that it can’t be possible," Schwarz recalled saying. So the team didn’t dedicate much time to it.
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16...Layout-Randomization-KASLR-With-Intel-TSX.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_page-table_isolation
Intel did know about this research and hopefully designed possible fixes but they all required a performance hit on current hardware like we see with the current microcode patches so we never saw them until the 'major' became public news.
Intel 'decided' to reduce the security envelope to the breaking point for increased performance with speculative execution and its interaction with cache.