6 ms·
If they need to be explicitly disabled, which they do, not many are going to do it, not much of an advantage if you ask me.
by AsyncAwait 7y ago
If they need to be explicitly disabled, which they do, not many are going to do it, not much of an advantage if you ask me.
- ajross 7y agoBig datacenters have large and talented engineering staff and routinely customize their machines and firmware heavily. Consumers aren't going to do it, that's true (and relevant to the article: all the Ice Lake parts mentioned are consumer chips). But on a per-revenue basis, most of the market is amenable to this kind of thing.
- radicalbyte 7y agoGamers are absolutely going to tweak every setting to increase performance of their machines.
- zrm 7y agoThe trouble is gamers are susceptible to it. They're running running all kinds of untrusted code (javascript, custom game levels created by other users) as well as receiving untrusted game data from other users in multiplayer games which commonly then goes through a data parser optimized for performance over security.
- brianwawok 7y agoWhile perhaps true in theory, has there ever been a known case where game DATA from a multiplayer game was able to exploit a remote system and say obtain root access? Stuff like rowhammer is very different vs something like a SQL injection on a website.
- girvo 7y agoIt seems so! https://revuln.com/files/Ferrante_Auriemma_0wning_Multiplayer_Online_Games.pdf https://revuln.com/files/Ferrante_Auriemma_0wning_Multiplaye...
- BoorishBears 7y agoPlenty of gamers download mods that straight up execute code on their machines. They also download game tools that are just code. They also run games that are just not secure. I know one that was storing user credentials in plain text in the registry (where no special permissions are needed to access it)
- radicalbyte 7y agoThey also download pirate games from sketchy Russian sites.
- posixplz 7y agoBig data centers are also most likely to be executing customer input. They almost certainly have all side-channel mitigations applies.
- deelowe 7y agoNot every physical die is running security sensitive code. In fact, most aren't.
- penagwin 7y agoSure the datacenter infrastructure won't require the mitigations, but every single multi-tenant die will. And I'm assuming my 5$/mo DO droplet isn't on it's own dedicated die....
- ajross 7y ago> every single multi-tenant die will. To be fair though, those chips are a comparatively small part of the datacenter market. Most of them are sitting in IT closets, or per the example above are running HPC workloads on bare metal. Cloud services are the sexy poster child for the segment, but not that large in total.
- blattimwind 7y agoIn HPC software is often optimized for the specific machine it is running on.