4 ms·
The attack is pretty brilliant; but it's also not quite novel. Cache-timing attacks aren't new; certainly CPU suppliers should have known the general issues at
by emn13 9y ago
The attack is pretty brilliant; but it's also not quite novel. Cache-timing attacks aren't new; certainly CPU suppliers should have known the general issues at hand for... at least a decade? See e.g. Colin Percival's somewhat related attack on hyperthreading way back in 2005: http://www.daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf http://www.daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf
Actually exploiting the information leakage isn't easy; and its compounded by the secrecy surrounding cpu internals. So I think they definitely deserve some blame here. Yes, the PoC is new. But the attack surface was widely known more than a decade ago, and they chose to punt the issue onto software; a solution that was unlikely to really hold water.
- contrarian_ 9y ago2006: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.190.1003&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.190... From the abstract: > Information leakage through covert channels and side channels is becoming a serious problem, especially when these are enhanced by modern processor architecture features. We show how processor architecture features such as simultaneous multithreading, control speculation and shared caches can inadvertently accelerate such covert channels or enable new covert channels and side channels.
- emn13 9y agoHey, there you go! I kind of doubt Intel really didn't know about this risk. They were cutting corners; that deserves some opprobrium - especially given their market-dominating position over this timespan.