4 ms·

I'm just sitting here waiting for all the security fiasco to stop ruining performance for ridiculous unpractical attacks. Just a matter of time, the pressure fo

I'm just sitting here waiting for all the security fiasco to stop ruining performance for ridiculous unpractical attacks. Just a matter of time, the pressure for better performance in a world where moore's law is getting stuck will eventually cause every sane person to throw these ridiculous patches out of the window. If the choice is between unsecure but fast to secure and slow, the default should be fast. Let applications who care about side channel deal with it their way, why the fuck should everything be so slow just so that few apps which actually care about side channel will be secure?

amaranth 8y ago
This is just the mitigations at the kernel level, to protect the kernel from applications and applications from each other. Without this applications can't even attempt to secure themselves from these issues. I think to allow applications a chance to opt into being secure from these attacks without applying the fixes system-wide you'd need a way to disable speculative memory reads per page which would nerf performance even harder for the applications that turned that option on.
gizmo686 8y ago
And I'm sitting here waiting for the industry to start taking security seriously. These are not ridiculously unpractical attacks. These are attacks that have been hypothesized for years and are only now getting attention because people finally started to create (public) demonstrations. I would be shocked if there were not already non-public exploits based on these vulnerabilities. The only reason these attacks even have the appearance of being unpractical is because there are so many other areas of our computing systems that are even easier to attack. The only reason we are in this current Spectre et. al. mess is that CPU vendors choose to prioritize performance over security, and we now have to live with their bluff getting called for another hardware generation or two. I suspect that the performance impact will be far less when the fixes are done during the hardware design process, instead of figuring out how to bolt them on after the fact. Ultimately, I think we are overdo for a new computer architecture (both in terms of security and performance, we are being encumbered by the need to keep new architectures backwards compatible with old ones).
umanwizard 8y ago
These attacks aren’t impractical at all. The very first announcement of spectre and meltdown came with trivial sample code.
reality_czech 8y ago
I'm sitting here waiting for you to realize "unsecure" is not a word.

amaranth 8y ago

This is just the mitigations at the kernel level, to protect the kernel from applications and applications from each other. Without this applications can't even attempt to secure themselves from these issues. I think to allow applications a chance to opt into being secure from these attacks without applying the fixes system-wide you'd need a way to disable speculative memory reads per page which would nerf performance even harder for the applications that turned that option on.

gizmo686 8y ago

And I'm sitting here waiting for the industry to start taking security seriously. These are not ridiculously unpractical attacks. These are attacks that have been hypothesized for years and are only now getting attention because people finally started to create (public) demonstrations. I would be shocked if there were not already non-public exploits based on these vulnerabilities. The only reason these attacks even have the appearance of being unpractical is because there are so many other areas of our computing systems that are even easier to attack. The only reason we are in this current Spectre et. al. mess is that CPU vendors choose to prioritize performance over security, and we now have to live with their bluff getting called for another hardware generation or two. I suspect that the performance impact will be far less when the fixes are done during the hardware design process, instead of figuring out how to bolt them on after the fact. Ultimately, I think we are overdo for a new computer architecture (both in terms of security and performance, we are being encumbered by the need to keep new architectures backwards compatible with old ones).

umanwizard 8y ago

These attacks aren’t impractical at all. The very first announcement of spectre and meltdown came with trivial sample code.

reality_czech 8y ago

I'm sitting here waiting for you to realize "unsecure" is not a word.