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There was a pre-Spectre proof of concept of a program telling what tabs you have open in your web browser: https://github.com/defuse/flush-reload-attacks https
by abecedarius 9y ago
There was a pre-Spectre proof of concept of a program telling what tabs you have open in your web browser:
https://github.com/defuse/flush-reload-attacks https://github.com/defuse/flush-reload-attacks
This was a program rather than another webpage, and I haven't bothered to read how it worked beyond the general idea of exploiting a cache side-channel. I expect the bit-rate is low compared to Spectre/Meltdown. But it made me leery of confidentiality in current systems.
- yzmtf2008 9y agoI think you have the idea of sandbox (or at least the idea of sandbox in the context of a web browser) backwards: it means an application (webpage) running inside the sandbox cannot access resources not granted. This side channel access does not run inside a sandbox at all.
- abecedarius 9y agoIf you don't consider an OS process a sandbox at all, why are even talking about security here?
- yzmtf2008 9y agoThat’s not the point of GP though? The whole premise of virtualization is that an OS process is not a perfect sandbox. There’s a hierarchy of sandboxes. Protecting other processes from accessing something inside the sandbox is not the job of a browser sandbox. This actually just goes to show the GP’s point: not all sandboxes are created equal.
- abecedarius 9y agoI was not arguing against kibwen, I was sharing some more points. People have implicitly expected OS processes to be better isolated from each other than they are. (I think there's a related problem that people tend not to think about which of the properties of integrity, confidentiality, and availability they rely on.)