I made this point [1] about the latest side-channel attacks: mixing various kinds of activities -- business and pleasure, familiar and unknown, critical and dis

I made this point [1] about the latest side-channel attacks: mixing various kinds of activities -- business and pleasure, familiar and unknown, critical and discretionary -- on the same computer is bad hygiene, at least with the sort of computers that are widespread today, and we ought to lift that conversation into the mainstream to point out the deficiencies of contemporary technology in the light of users' expectations and demands. A robust defense against the likes of Meltdown and the likes of Word macros is to perform the work in an environment from which the context of execution cannot escape, and cannot cause the infiltration of data into itself by exfiltrating it from a sibling or a neighbor. Historically the most successful way of achieving this is to use separate hardware, but that's a burden most users won't accept. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16165942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16165942