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"Safely" sharing a Linux kernel? There's no reason to believe Spectre and Meltdown were a one time thing, especially since the response has been to apply ad-ho
by mike_hock 7y ago
"Safely" sharing a Linux kernel?
There's no reason to believe Spectre and Meltdown were a one time thing, especially since the response has been to apply ad-hoc fixes just good enough to break the proofs-of-concept. On the contrary, they demonstrate that such vulnerabilities are possible and we should expect to see them again.
Even barring CPU bugs, the kernel is one giant attack surface, all written in C, all running with full ring 0 privileges. Find ONE hole to pwn.
- jrockway 7y agoIt's not mainstream yet but it's the direction people want to go. Like I said, making the OS smaller means less attack surface, so it's certainly something worth investigating. But a lot of work has been done to make Linux safe enough, so that is a likely direction for the mainstream to go.