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The underlying AMD paper made the front page of HN a few days ago, though without much discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645903 https://news.yc
by makomk 6y ago
The underlying AMD paper made the front page of HN a few days ago, though without much discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645903
It's an interesting vulnerability but of limited impact, since of course every fast modern CPU is affected by Spectre anyway. The main consequence seems to be that, at least in theory, this has to be disabled in order for certain Spectre mitigations to work correctly. I don't think anyone's found a practical attack using this yet.
- hpcjoe 6y agoThe operative phrase is "yet". Better safe than sorry. I've not read the paper yet, and I am curious on the performance impact. I don't mind trading some performance for better security. Because when exploits are found in the wild, its too late.
- mlyle 6y agoThe thing is, this can be disabled A) per thread, and B) can't leak from other processes (it's flushed on each context switch). So really, we want certain processes with software based sandboxing -- e.g. Javascript interpreters-- to turn this off.