4 ms·
if people would still use good old owned hardware without any virtualizsation, spectre and meltdown would not be as scary as it really is on server hardware. wh
by merb 9y ago
if people would still use good old owned hardware without any virtualizsation, spectre and meltdown would not be as scary as it really is on server hardware. which means that only clients would be affected.
but since everything runs on the cloud, we basically need to update the whole world.
- ebbv 9y agoFirst off, having dedicated hardware doesn't make these a non-issue, it just makes them less of an issue. If you have dedicated hardware they are concerns. Applications still need to be isolated from each other, and it's a path for someone who gets in as a user to potentially leverage it to root access. Second, saying everyone should have dedicated hardware is just nonsense. It's like saying everyone should run their own datacenter. For most people neither of those makes financial sense.
- kazagistar 9y agoIt's still pretty scary to have computers where all of memory is readabe from every process, even if you own them.
- merb 9y agowell 50:50 chances are high that if a process goes bogus, that you have more problems than just "memory is readable from every process". (of course that does not apply to clients where code can run in jit (javascript), software that communicates with the internet, etc and runs on a remote machine). most servers probably should only run trusted code (of course that is mostly never the case because no company evaluates every process they running) but chances are high that if some uses linux and gnu stuff that most shady stuff gets catched. (I mean if not, some people could do a lot of bad stuff, consider a misbehaving systemd, nginx/apache, databases, which could basically do a lot of harm.)