How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst' chip flaw

Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by cryptonector on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:37PM (#16073847)

In the world of crypto we've known about cache timing issues forever. Writing cryptographic algorithm implementations so that they are constant-time is really hard, but also always the goal nowadays, as timing side-channels are and long have been a big deal.

What's new here is exploitation of speculative execution (branch prediction). It takes what was already difficult in the world of crypto to a new level of difficulty (or maybe not; it looks like the fix for this will be to effectively disable branch prediction in sensitive code, or even preferably by default and enable it only where it's necessary and safe).

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Re:How a researcher hacked his own computer and found 'worst... by gefh on Thursday January 04, 2018 @03:45PM (#16073912)

I think you need to disable branch prediction on any core that has access to sensitive memory, not just during the execution of sensitive code. It's 'untrusted' code running on the same machine that you need to worry about.

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