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> Jakub Szefer‘s invited talk on “Thermal and Voltage Side Channels and Attacks in Cloud FPGAs” described a rather nifty side-channel through which secrets coul

> Jakub Szefer‘s invited talk on “Thermal and Voltage Side Channels and Attacks in Cloud FPGAs” described a rather nifty side-channel through which secrets could be leaked in the context of cloud-based FPGAs. I have a feeling, that we are going to find that multi-tenant hardware is a no-go for security. This will have profound implications on the cloud business.

SomeHacker44 7y ago
You can already get dedicated, single tenant "cloud" hardware from a variety of vendors.
jchw 7y ago
Even if true, I don’t know if this is as big of a deal as it seems. To me it looks as though a great amount of the value provided by cloud providers today is actually all of the services provided around code, like databases, caches, firewalls, and probably hundreds of other services that are parallel to compute tasks and should be able to handle multi-tenant workloads safely. Even if multi-tenant arbitrary code execution proves to have unfixable side channel vulnerabilities: - You are obviously still not allowed to go and steal other people’s data. Anyone providing VMs could work towards potentially both mitigating and detecting side-channel attacks. - Not every workload is the same level of sensitivity; some software may need almost no secrecy at all. Sure, you definitely can’t be handling user data or credit card info. But, OTOH, with newer managed stacks and APIs like Stripe, you might not even be doing that on your own backend at all. You may not even have your own backend. - You can, of course, get single-tenant VMs from some cloud providers. It will be less flexible but it’s already necessary for some workloads for compliance reasons. It’s also worth considering the severity of side channel exploits; they certainly work but practical usable attacks are probably not going to happen for every new side-channel exploit.

SomeHacker44 7y ago

You can already get dedicated, single tenant "cloud" hardware from a variety of vendors.

jchw 7y ago

Even if true, I don’t know if this is as big of a deal as it seems. To me it looks as though a great amount of the value provided by cloud providers today is actually all of the services provided around code, like databases, caches, firewalls, and probably hundreds of other services that are parallel to compute tasks and should be able to handle multi-tenant workloads safely. Even if multi-tenant arbitrary code execution proves to have unfixable side channel vulnerabilities: - You are obviously still not allowed to go and steal other people’s data. Anyone providing VMs could work towards potentially both mitigating and detecting side-channel attacks. - Not every workload is the same level of sensitivity; some software may need almost no secrecy at all. Sure, you definitely can’t be handling user data or credit card info. But, OTOH, with newer managed stacks and APIs like Stripe, you might not even be doing that on your own backend at all. You may not even have your own backend. - You can, of course, get single-tenant VMs from some cloud providers. It will be less flexible but it’s already necessary for some workloads for compliance reasons. It’s also worth considering the severity of side channel exploits; they certainly work but practical usable attacks are probably not going to happen for every new side-channel exploit.