33 ms·

tptacek exploits computers for a living, so it's glorious for him :)

by bouk 9y ago

tlrobinson 9y ago
Isn't that a bit like a firefighter saying your house burning down is "glorious"?
- amaranth 9y ago
  The result might not be glorious but the fire is amazing to watch.
- gpm 9y ago
  To the extent that he exploits computers for a living (e.g. pentesting) and not stops exploits for a living, it seems more like a (presumably law-abiding) arsonist calling houses burning glorious.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Arsonists set fires. Vendors create vulnerabilities, not pentesters.
    - phyzome 9y ago
      Ooooh, I dunno, I might argue that vendors have their role in creating pentesters. ;-)
- JshWright 9y ago
  How many firefighters do you know? I guarantee you every one of them gets excited at the prospect of a "good" structure fire.
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    Maybe more like a meteorologist excited by a really bad storm.
tptacek 9y ago
It's not that it makes the practice of breaking into computers that much more interesting so much as it makes the underlying field much more interesting to work in. The engineering problems just got a lot more complex. We're all taking an attack vector seriously --- microarchitectural side channels --- that we weren't taking as seriously before, except as an abstract threat to crypto and a way of defeating a mitigation --- KASLR --- that nobody believed in anyways. What's glorious is that serious software security people now have to start being literate about what it means to reverse engineer and dump the branch history buffers on different CPUs. Getting dragged through this kind of minutiae is the reason I'm still in this field after 22 years. And I'm just a bystander here. Imagine what it must have been like for Jann Horn over the last several months! This subsection describes how we reverse-engineered the internals of the Haswell branch predictor. Some of this is written down from memory, since we didn't keep a detailed record of what we were doing. ... because shit was so crazy while they were working this out that they didn't have the cycles to write everything down!
- FractalNerve 9y ago
  > they didn't have the cycles to write everything down! hahaha that was a good pun! Do you have a link to Jann Horns personal blog or Github? I've not never heard of him before.
  - panarky 9y ago
    https://github.com/thejh https://github.com/thejh https://thejh.net/ https://thejh.net/ https://twitter.com/tehjh https://twitter.com/tehjh
- ufo 9y ago
  As someone specializing on a different field, this comment reads to me as if you were an astronomer being excited about discovering a gigantic meteor heading towards the Earth :)
  - tptacek 9y ago
    Sure, if your subfield of astronomy was all about practical ways to adapt to living on meteor fragments!

tptacek exploits computers for a living, so it's glorious for him :)

by bouk 9y ago

tptacek exploits computers for a living, so it's glorious for him :)

tlrobinson 9y ago

Isn't that a bit like a firefighter saying your house burning down is "glorious"?

amaranth 9y ago
The result might not be glorious but the fire is amazing to watch.
gpm 9y ago
To the extent that he exploits computers for a living (e.g. pentesting) and not stops exploits for a living, it seems more like a (presumably law-abiding) arsonist calling houses burning glorious.
- tptacek 9y ago
  Arsonists set fires. Vendors create vulnerabilities, not pentesters.
  - phyzome 9y ago
    Ooooh, I dunno, I might argue that vendors have their role in creating pentesters. ;-)
JshWright 9y ago
How many firefighters do you know? I guarantee you every one of them gets excited at the prospect of a "good" structure fire.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Maybe more like a meteorologist excited by a really bad storm.

tptacek 9y ago

It's not that it makes the practice of breaking into computers that much more interesting so much as it makes the underlying field much more interesting to work in. The engineering problems just got a lot more complex. We're all taking an attack vector seriously --- microarchitectural side channels --- that we weren't taking as seriously before, except as an abstract threat to crypto and a way of defeating a mitigation --- KASLR --- that nobody believed in anyways. What's glorious is that serious software security people now have to start being literate about what it means to reverse engineer and dump the branch history buffers on different CPUs. Getting dragged through this kind of minutiae is the reason I'm still in this field after 22 years. And I'm just a bystander here. Imagine what it must have been like for Jann Horn over the last several months! This subsection describes how we reverse-engineered the internals of the Haswell branch predictor. Some of this is written down from memory, since we didn't keep a detailed record of what we were doing. ... because shit was so crazy while they were working this out that they didn't have the cycles to write everything down!

FractalNerve 9y ago
> they didn't have the cycles to write everything down! hahaha that was a good pun! Do you have a link to Jann Horns personal blog or Github? I've not never heard of him before.
- panarky 9y ago
  https://github.com/thejh https://github.com/thejh https://thejh.net/ https://thejh.net/ https://twitter.com/tehjh https://twitter.com/tehjh
ufo 9y ago
As someone specializing on a different field, this comment reads to me as if you were an astronomer being excited about discovering a gigantic meteor heading towards the Earth :)
- tptacek 9y ago
  Sure, if your subfield of astronomy was all about practical ways to adapt to living on meteor fragments!