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> The root cause of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities was that processor architects were trying to build not just fast processors, but fast processors th
by sullyj3 7y ago
> The root cause of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities was that processor architects were trying to build not just fast processors, but fast processors that expose the same abstract machine as a PDP-11.
What would an abstract machine that better matched current processors look like?
Edit: Probably should've read the rest of the article first
- vectorEQ 7y agoThis paper might be of interest: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.05178.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.05178.pdf it explains the 'concept' of these kind of attacks and why its kind of impossible to make an abstraction which does not suffer from such flaws in the presence of high precision timers which are in turn needed for high precision applications (not sure what, i guess realtime applications or things which need to measure super precise.. maybe audio / video ? ) the paper goes a bit further and imo is a bit simpler to read than the original spectre / meltdown papers.