3 ms·

Well 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

Well 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 8y ago
Major cloud companies and VM providers? Most of these vulnerabilities come from speculative execution impacting a shared cache.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  Nah, 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 8y ago
    In 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 8y ago
      I 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.
- xxs 8y ago
  Major cloud companies == energy consumption. Most of the time cloud users would be able to 'just' rent the entire machines and not have to bother with 'untrusted' code.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Yeah, this is sounding like a good angle to start with. Target users are people who need to squeeze as much performance out of hardware as they can without leaking information while running untrusted code. So, cloud providers seems like exactly where to start. Cloud providers who target security-sensitive users who also don't have a lot of money (to just pad the hardware budget) would be ideal.
pjc50 8y ago
Cryptocurrency users? (Although they tend to be very bad at threat modelling)
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Yeah, that's a good starting point. Maybe not just cryptocurrency users, but "people who have expensive digital assets on a computer that runs untrusted code". Although, it kind of seems like, the more expensive you digital assets, the more you just need to a) hire a full time security person and b) insure your asset. I'm not sure how a new OS would fit into that. It seems like it would have to be people WITHOUT a lot of assets who would be the initial customers. People who can't just pay a security person to go over their images. So maybe casual crypto users. But wouldn't they be better off just with a custom dongle? A dongle isn't running untrusted software. Also, isn't part of this technology that it squeezes a little more performance out of a machine without leaking information? That takes me to the comment below... cloud hosting platforms.

ryacko 8y ago

Major cloud companies and VM providers? Most of these vulnerabilities come from speculative execution impacting a shared cache.

gmueckl 8y ago
Nah, 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 8y ago
  In 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 8y ago
    I 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.
xxs 8y ago
Major cloud companies == energy consumption. Most of the time cloud users would be able to 'just' rent the entire machines and not have to bother with 'untrusted' code.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
Yeah, this is sounding like a good angle to start with. Target users are people who need to squeeze as much performance out of hardware as they can without leaking information while running untrusted code. So, cloud providers seems like exactly where to start. Cloud providers who target security-sensitive users who also don't have a lot of money (to just pad the hardware budget) would be ideal.

pjc50 8y ago

Cryptocurrency users? (Although they tend to be very bad at threat modelling)

erikpukinskis 8y ago
Yeah, that's a good starting point. Maybe not just cryptocurrency users, but "people who have expensive digital assets on a computer that runs untrusted code". Although, it kind of seems like, the more expensive you digital assets, the more you just need to a) hire a full time security person and b) insure your asset. I'm not sure how a new OS would fit into that. It seems like it would have to be people WITHOUT a lot of assets who would be the initial customers. People who can't just pay a security person to go over their images. So maybe casual crypto users. But wouldn't they be better off just with a custom dongle? A dongle isn't running untrusted software. Also, isn't part of this technology that it squeezes a little more performance out of a machine without leaking information? That takes me to the comment below... cloud hosting platforms.