4 ms·

Yes, I am aware of them and agree with you. In fact, cache-miss side channel attacks are known by academics for years as well. However, this is the first time s

Yes, I am aware of them and agree with you. In fact, cache-miss side channel attacks are known by academics for years as well. However, this is the first time someone combining various of previous techniques (timing, cache-miss, speculative loading etc.) together to make this attack work. Quote from the meltdown paper: > We expect that Meltdown and Spectre open a new field of research to investigate in what extent performance optimizations change the microarchitectural state, how this state can be translated into an architectural state, and how such attacks can be prevented. So we won't see the last of Spectre.

emn13 9y ago
Right, so to stick a label on it: the exploit is novel, the vulnerability is not. Why does that matter? Because people seem to imply intel isn't to blame here; that since the attacks were unforeseen, it's essentially just bad luck. But that's not the case: the risky bits of architecture were known. It's like finding a memory corruption vulnerability and then deciding not to fix it since you don't also know of an exploit - that's just being careless. Furthermore; finding holes like this isn't some divine act; although there is luck and skill involved there's no question that others can do so too. Even if an attack were completely new, you have to ask yourself how hard it was to find. Does a supplier have any responsibility to provide secure things? Then they should be looking for these kinds of holes. Obviously to a novice any hack like this looks almost magical - but there's a risk that by interpreting any novel attack as not-their-fault that the vulnerable supplier never bothers trying to make anything secure. Intel was being careless. They should definitely have known this was exploitable even without knowing how to exploit it. And it's at least conceivable that they could have found this or an exploit like this if they had tried.
guitarbill 9y ago
> We expect that Meltdown and Spectre open a new field of research to investigate in what extent performance optimizations change the microarchitectural state, how this state can be translated into an architectural state, and how such attacks can be prevented. Not to be cynical or downplay the research, but that's the kind of thing you (have to?) put into papers to make getting research funding easier in future. Hardly a new field, just very difficult to do research on.

emn13 9y ago

Right, so to stick a label on it: the exploit is novel, the vulnerability is not. Why does that matter? Because people seem to imply intel isn't to blame here; that since the attacks were unforeseen, it's essentially just bad luck. But that's not the case: the risky bits of architecture were known. It's like finding a memory corruption vulnerability and then deciding not to fix it since you don't also know of an exploit - that's just being careless. Furthermore; finding holes like this isn't some divine act; although there is luck and skill involved there's no question that others can do so too. Even if an attack were completely new, you have to ask yourself how hard it was to find. Does a supplier have any responsibility to provide secure things? Then they should be looking for these kinds of holes. Obviously to a novice any hack like this looks almost magical - but there's a risk that by interpreting any novel attack as not-their-fault that the vulnerable supplier never bothers trying to make anything secure. Intel was being careless. They should definitely have known this was exploitable even without knowing how to exploit it. And it's at least conceivable that they could have found this or an exploit like this if they had tried.

guitarbill 9y ago

> We expect that Meltdown and Spectre open a new field of research to investigate in what extent performance optimizations change the microarchitectural state, how this state can be translated into an architectural state, and how such attacks can be prevented. Not to be cynical or downplay the research, but that's the kind of thing you (have to?) put into papers to make getting research funding easier in future. Hardly a new field, just very difficult to do research on.