4 ms·

Yeah, this is just 'wow' level work. And it's going to be a NIGHTMARE to fix. I don't think most people realize how much of a ballet it is that chips on devic

Yeah, this is just 'wow' level work. And it's going to be a NIGHTMARE to fix. I don't think most people realize how much of a ballet it is that chips on devices like phones are doing on a nanosecond-to-nanosecond basis. The thermal and energy management is utter voodoo. They're allocating work to different parts of the chip calculating the time it will take for the last hotspot to drop close enough to thermal equilibrium to be used again without straight up destroying the circuits, dancing activity all around the chip just to avoid frying it. To them layer on top of that 'well you have to do it in a way that emits not a single bit of useful information in any form, thermal, radio, energy, etc'... someone somewhere who is very smart is having a very, very bad day.

mjevans 9y ago
It might be a better approach to have executing code signal if a segment is a security-critical section or not. In that way a performance hit might be taken while doing work in a properly secure way but the rest of the time things could be run in a looser manor. Taking that concept further, it might be worth it to have an 'edgy' state as well, where the results aren't super critical but merely nice to have (EG for software video decoding).
wmf 9y ago
This particular attack isn't that bad. It relies on putting the VRM into "illegal" configurations (overclocking/undervolting) thus it can be fixed by preventing such configurations in hardware.