3 ms·

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.