6 ms·
This post lifts out the key parts of the paper [1] and is a good summary. I think the paper is an accessible read as well. Not too much discussion two weeks ag
by niftich 7y ago
This post lifts out the key parts of the paper [1] and is a good summary. I think the paper is an accessible read as well.
Not too much discussion two weeks ago when the paper was posted on HN [2], so I will raise a point I've made before [3][4][5] and is consistent with the recommendations of the paper (and another post in this thread [6]): this is an opportunity to improve the terminology, mental models, and formalisms of observable state, and its implications for information hiding, privilege separation, and computer system design.
This conversation needs not only to occur among (e.g.) computer chip designers and cryptography experts, but also among higher-stack users of that technology, so that the information leakage aspects and trade-offs can be analyzed together with other performance indicators of the system.
It seems as if the haphazard, ad hoc way that chipmakers and system architects dealt with this issue have contributed to an environment where Spectre could occur: and such timing attacks were never a secret, but resistance to them in various levels of mainstream computing appears to have been fitted in a patchwork of hasty fixes and well-meaning but informal caution. The conversation around this topic could use an upgrade, and the paper's authors agree.
[1] https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/csiroabstracts/Ge_YCH_19.abstract.pml https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/csiroabstracts/Ge_YC... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19547293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19547293 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17308014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17308014 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16165942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16165942 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19644997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19644997 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19670296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19670296
- ccvannorman 7y agoYou might even say there's room for a startup to reinvent computers (and operating systems) from the ground up. Would you?
- fooker 7y agoWith about a hundred billion dollars of funding and a ten years to market schedule, maybe?
- niftich 7y agoI don't know if I'd look at it with that lens. Clearly, knowledge and analyses of this topic are resident in academia and have been long present at various levels of industry, but other factors like performance and power consumption have received generous affordances by hardware designers, and makers of system software and application software had to step in where the hardware provided little help for leak-proof sharing. In retrospect, the market may have rewarded hardware makers' direction of pursuit -- until now, but the survivors of those past pursuits remain. Leak-proof sharing of resources may be a more marketable pursuit now, with cloud providers hosting code from mutually untrusted parties, and consumers running delivered applications and untrusted Javascript on the same machine, but I'd rather see the conversation about this topic improve across the board, independent from commercial forces.
- Sophistifunk 7y agoNot until the people who are building existing systems become (financially / legally) liable for their mistakes. Homogeneity is fragile, but it's also extremely cheap, which is how we got here.
- zoeysaurusrex 7y agoDo you think that people in the software field need something like the AMA to protect us so that we can have liability?
- erikpukinskis 7y agoWell let's think it through. It would seemingly have to follow the Disruptive Technology arc. That means it would start off as a crappy computer that had really great information leakage control. And it would be marketed to a small but enthusiastic market who really values that, and doesn't mind that most everything else is a PITA. Who might that market be?
- ryacko 7y agoMajor cloud companies and VM providers? Most of these vulnerabilities come from speculative execution impacting a shared cache.
- gmueckl 7y agoNah, cloud providers are under enornlis pressure to optimize resource usage (real estate, electricity, labor). A hardware design without competitive performance has a snowball's chance in hell of being adopted in that space. The economics of cloud datancenter mean that security only needs to be good enough, not perfect.
- pferde 7y agoIn that case, the perception that current hardware security is good enough needs to change. Or the cloud vendors could start offering compute running on new, more secure hardware - e.g. special VM types marketed accordingly.
- gmueckl 7y agoI think that this is wishful thinking on your part unless the drastic performance per power drops are negated. I personally think that these performance drops leads to a horrific environmental impact because every performance drop means that more hardware needs to be provisioned and powered to counter it. So this directly results in more toxic waste from these elecronics and a higher carbon dioxide output into the atmosphere (cloud data centers are a major consumer of electricity). Compared to the long term impact of that, a extra few security breaches sound like the lesser evil to me personally.
- ToolsDevler 7y agoYou'd have to be fast. HP is on it: https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/creative-hardware/hps-machine-will-fundamentally-redesign-computer-architecture-leading-100tb-phones/ https://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/news/creative-hardware/h... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/01/hp_memristor_2018/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/01/hp_memristor_2018/
- Latteland 7y ago4 more years till that 2013 plan reaches the 10 year threshold.