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A comment on Reading privileged memory with a side-channel. Parent comment

Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by gervase on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @06:24PM (#16066468)
Project Zero is very well known for things exactly like this. Partially, it's because they are incredibly talented, but there are also talented people in academia and in other security consultancies. The biggest difference with Project Zero is that their primary [0] goal is altruistic: find vulnerabilities, and let people who can fix them know (vs publishing papers, securing paying clients, auctioning zero-days, etc), in the interests of making the internet and computing as a whole a safer place.

[0] Their secondary goals are to protect Google products and services, and to provide excellent PR in line with what we're discussing right here.

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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by cjbprime on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @06:28PM (#16066496)
Worth noting that in this case, many of the authors are in academia. It wasn't solely a Google project.
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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by tonfa on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @06:44PM (#16066613)
I read it as it was an independent discovery by project zero and by academia researchers.
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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by ajasmin on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @07:05PM (#16066731)
Independent discovery don't happen overnight. Intel must have been aware of these vulnerabilities for some time.

edit: I'm sure everyone involved acted responsibly. I'm just curious as how far apart these independent discoveries were made.

The bug has been around forever, but it must have been discovered relatively recently since it's not fixed in hardware yet.

I've always been baffled by the concept of simultaneous discovery.

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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by teraflop on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @07:27PM (#16066858)
The Spectre paper includes this line in the acknowledgements:

> We would like to thank Intel for their professional handling of this issue through communicating a clear timeline and connecting all involved researchers.

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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by nasredin on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:19AM (#16068756)
So Google people and the Germans were working on the same thing without knowing of each other until Intel connected them?
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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by consp on Thursday January 04, 2018 @04:49AM (#16069086)
Graz is in Austria, but considering these things are usually kept quiet quite long: probably yes
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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by forgot-my-pw on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:24PM (#16067194)
Google project zero blog says: We reported this issue to Intel, AMD and ARM on 2017-06-01
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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by rdtsc on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:01AM (#16068704)
We talked about NSA and how people are leaving for greener pastures. Wondered two things:

1) Have any of them ended up in Project Zero or working on stuff like this

2) Wonder if NSA knew about this vulnerability and now someone there in a windowless office is sighing saying to themselves "Welp, another backdoor we can't use".

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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by ComodoHacker on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:34AM (#16068801)
>their primary [0] goal is altruistic: ... making the internet and computing as a whole a safer place.

Which is, at the same time, highly rational: to secure their entire market.

It's nice to have big corp's incentives aligned with the public good. Too bad it happens so rarely.

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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by kzrdude on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @07:35PM (#16066900)
Hm that's tricky. These awesome findings didn't exactly provide net value for google, not even on the not so short term (next 10 years?). They've created a large problem for Google! :-)
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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by ehsankia on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @07:50PM (#16066986)
Yes and no. The cost of some malicious party figuring it out and using it on Google would potentially been far greater than anything this could cost.
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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by oh_sigh on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @07:51PM (#16066994)
How much value would be destroyed if black hats discovered the bug first and people started discovering that information from their Google cloud VMs was getting leaked?

Sure, Google could just patch themselves, but the information to recreate the issue would surely be leaked by a xoogler, since it only takes a single sentence describing the vuln for a competent sec team to recreate it

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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by make3 on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:24PM (#16067202)
Discovering a vulnerability is not creating it. A vulnerability exists even if it was not publicly disclosed. There were probably other people already exploiting it.
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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by tanilama on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @09:37PM (#16067540)
Imagine the law suit if Google fails to detect this....
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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by mason240 on Thursday January 04, 2018 @10:30AM (#16071015)
Suppose you have transportaion company that owns 80% of the market share for everything transported on the roads. By car, van, truck, semi, everything.

Suppose your company also has a team that inspects public bridges to make sure they don't collapse.

Is it really altruistic, or given your market share is it a cost of business?

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Re:Reading privileged memory with a side-channel by asgioiobuio on Thursday January 04, 2018 @01:01AM (#16068369)
Oh, come on. Their only goal is to make Google money. The fact that they do useful work is a nice side effect, but if they didn't improve Google's security and give good PR there's not a chance in Hell Google would keep them around.
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