Re:Building a More Secure World with the RISC-V ISA
by sevensor on Sunday January 07, 2018 @09:59AM
(#16091038)
> this is the time everyone and their brother, sister, mother and child will have something to sell you
One can only hope! At this point we could stand to have some architectural fragmentation. I'm pretty happy to see RISC-V blatantly capitalizing on this situation.
Re:Building a More Secure World with the RISC-V ISA
by ansible on Sunday January 07, 2018 @03:25AM
(#16089889)
Yes. Only when you completely eliminate the conventional kind of speculative execution [0] can you have a hope of being immune to these sorry of problems.
Re:Building a More Secure World with the RISC-V ISA
by cwzwarich on Sunday January 07, 2018 @01:23PM
(#16091887)
Why do you think such an architecture is completely invulnerable? The Summary #2 slide lists the following as a benefit of the Mill:
- Can load across protection boundaries Valid data is usable; invalid data cannot be seen
At the very least, this probably makes ASLR pretty easy to defeat across protection boundaries. Are you really willing to bet that there will never be a more clever exploit that can determine more information? In slide 51 of the IPC talk[0] they explicitly say that they put permissions checking after the cache, and that this is essential for their performance and power claims.
[0] https://millcomputing.com/docs/inter-process-communication/
Re:Building a More Secure World with the RISC-V ISA
by phkahler on Sunday January 07, 2018 @08:19AM
(#16090763)
Not really. What nobody has said AFAICT is that the attacks all stem from the problem of running untrusted code on your processor. It's not just apps or websites, we let JS code run our machine for every little ad banner. We allow our cloud infrastructure to share cache with someone else's. These things are all done in the name of convenience. Only when security is considered a top priority will these problems really go away. We must stop running untrusted code. Even. In. A. Sandbox.
Re:Building a More Secure World with the RISC-V ISA
by taf2 on Sunday January 07, 2018 @09:46AM
(#16090994)
We will always have bugs. The amount of money and resource efficiency we gain from sharing is too big to ignore. These issue will be addressed and yes more issues will be uncovered. Our sandboxes will get better, our kernels will harden and our CPU designs will improve. It’s actually not possible to throw our hands in the air and stop as you suggest. From every mistake we grow stronger because we don’t run away. It’s great that these issues have been uncovered. It sucks dealing with the fallout but that is only short term.
Re:Building a More Secure World with the RISC-V ISA
by blattimwind on Sunday January 07, 2018 @03:00PM
(#16092358)
While this is acceptable for the average application, Meltdown and Spectre should have made it clear to even the last idiot that shared infrastructure is. not. suitable. for security critical applications. Especially not for critical cryptographic applications.
Re:Building a More Secure World with the RISC-V ISA
by pjmlp on Sunday January 07, 2018 @02:44PM
(#16092266)
We would have less of them if companies were liable like in other industries.
Re:Building a More Secure World with the RISC-V ISA
by taf2 on Sunday January 07, 2018 @09:10PM
(#16094130)
And we’d have less innovation... perhaps at some point that is what we decide we need and well that is one reason for us in the technology space to take security seriously to help keep from allowing regulation into industry... as they say it only takes one asshole to screw all up for the rest of us...
Re:Building a More Secure World with the RISC-V ISA
by pjmlp on Monday January 08, 2018 @01:13AM
(#16094983)
I fail to see why, given the innovation going in those industries, like cars, medical, building materials and so forth.
Creating IRC clones, UNIX clones, talk clones, FB clones is anything but innovation.
Either way, this is the time everyone and their brother, sister, mother and child will have something to sell you, so it's not surprised the RISC-V people are out to sell their architecture now.