Meltdown & Spectre – Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs vulnerable

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Roman
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Meltdown & Spectre – Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs vulnerable

Post by Roman »

That Intel-specific bug and now these cross-platform two... I just have no words.

https://meltdownattack.com
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/ ... -side.html
In addition to violating process isolation boundaries using native code, Spectre attacks can also be used to violate browser sandboxing, by mounting them via portable JavaScript code. We wrote a JavaScript program that successfully reads data from the address space of the browser process running it.
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Re: Meltdown & Spectre – Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs vulnerable

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Roman wrote:That Intel-specific bug and now these cross-platform two... I just have no words.

https://meltdownattack.com
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/ ... -side.html
In addition to violating process isolation boundaries using native code, Spectre attacks can also be used to violate browser sandboxing, by mounting them via portable JavaScript code. We wrote a JavaScript program that successfully reads data from the address space of the browser process running it.
Wouldn't it be enough to invalidate the entire cache every time we switch/enter/exit/terminate/create a process or thread? Or just disabling the CPU cache entirely for security-critical machines?

It seems to me that the intention is just having a cache that is separated for each process (instead of the existing one which is global to the CPU/computer) so there is no possibility to read leftover cached data between arbitrary processes.
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Re: Meltdown & Spectre – Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs vulnerable

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Try that in your OS and see what happens. I'd expect a massive performance hit.
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Re: Meltdown & Spectre – Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs vulnerable

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It's a hot topic, but please try to keep it together.

http://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?f= ... ff#p281534
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Re: Meltdown & Spectre – Intel, AMD and ARM CPUs vulnerable

Post by ggodw000 »

since this one is in ramblings, may be can be reserved for non-technical, political aspect of it.
The whole things looks like some publicity stunt.
key takeaway after spending yrs on sw industry: big issue small because everyone jumps on it and fixes it. small issue is big since everyone ignores and it causes catastrophy later. #devilisinthedetails
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