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No, these vulnerabilities potentially let userspace code escalate privileges, which could lead to ransomware or credential exfiltration. Stealing bank account p
by tylerhou 7y ago
No, these vulnerabilities potentially let userspace code escalate privileges, which could lead to ransomware or credential exfiltration. Stealing bank account passwords clearly does damage, and various governments have paid ransoms on the order of $100,000 to recover encrypted files.
I’d argue that side-channel attacks are less of a problem in the server space because servers generally don’t download untrusted code from the internet and execute that code blindly (assuming you aren’t running other peoples’ VMs).
- rblatz 7y ago> assuming you aren’t running other peoples’ VMs But that’s exactly what cloud does.
- the_duke 7y ago> assuming you aren’t running other peoples’ VMs That's the problem right there: the vast majority of workloads in the cloud runs on shared hosts. AWS/GC dedicated host pricing is not actually that crazy of a markup (around 50% last time I investigated), but that's still very noticeable at scale, and billing granularity is by the hour.
- tylerhou 7y agoI agree public cloud needs mitigations to be secure. But a significant number of workloads (~50%?) run on-prem or in private clouds. Those generally host "more trusted" code.
- the_duke 7y agoTrue, but only if you trust all your services equally, or restrict each host to a single one. Otherwise you lose a security boundary.