Re:Spectre and the end of langsec
by gumby on Thursday January 11, 2018 @06:15PM
(#16128980)
> Spectre has nothing to do with program correctness or safety. It has everything to do with hardware's correctness and safety.
But that “hardware” is mostly a program running on a machine whose ISA you don’t know. Intel is shipping a microcode patch.
In an earlier life I wrote microcode, as well as programming machines whose ISA could be changed by rewiring the backplane (PDP-10). I used to think I “knew the machine” and, in today’s parlance, “the stack” as well. Not anymore — nobody can grasp the entire stack.
But that “hardware” is mostly a program running on a machine whose ISA you don’t know. Intel is shipping a microcode patch.
In an earlier life I wrote microcode, as well as programming machines whose ISA could be changed by rewiring the backplane (PDP-10). I used to think I “knew the machine” and, in today’s parlance, “the stack” as well. Not anymore — nobody can grasp the entire stack.