[Cryptography] Skylake fails on Mersenne Prime 14942209 exponent

[John Levine]

In article <E1aIo04-0001LU-Pk at elasmtp-mealy.atl.sa.earthlink.net> you write:
>FYI -- The fishy part of this story is the fact that Intel claims this bug can be fixed with a "BIOS
>update".  If true, this is proof positive that the arithmetic unit of these Intel processors can be
>hacked in essentially invisible ways by (van) Nessa.

I wouldn't leap to conclusions.  More likely the BIOS update changes a
timer or voltage setting to prevent a race condition that's causing
the hang.  The last time I checked, field programmable microcode
memory was a lot more expensive than normal microcode ROM and it's a
stretch to believe that Intel secretly incuded some, just in case.

R's,
John