Re:Spectre/Meltdown Pits Transparency Against Liability
by the8472 on Thursday February 01, 2018 @03:14PM
(#16285435)
> but we refuse to acknowledge that our CPU's are critical to safety because we don't pay much attention to how pervasively they are used
What kind of safety are we talking about? Nuclear power plants? Airplanes? Self-driving cars? If so, why would you be running untrusted, remote code on the CPUs of the critical components?
Sure, there occasionally are CPU bugs where the CPUs just randomly lock up, but we can defend against that with redundancy. The meltdown bug on the other hand requires malicious activity on the same chip, i.e. you need to offer an attacker a sandbox to run code on and then hope the sandbox holds and is properly resource-limited to not DoS your safety-critical system. It's a risk you shouldn't be taking in the first place.
And if we're just talking about credit card data well, we can easily compensate by moving to dedicated instances once such a problem becomes known, it's no worse than hypervisor escapes which become known every now and then.
What kind of safety are we talking about? Nuclear power plants? Airplanes? Self-driving cars? If so, why would you be running untrusted, remote code on the CPUs of the critical components?
Sure, there occasionally are CPU bugs where the CPUs just randomly lock up, but we can defend against that with redundancy. The meltdown bug on the other hand requires malicious activity on the same chip, i.e. you need to offer an attacker a sandbox to run code on and then hope the sandbox holds and is properly resource-limited to not DoS your safety-critical system. It's a risk you shouldn't be taking in the first place.
And if we're just talking about credit card data well, we can easily compensate by moving to dedicated instances once such a problem becomes known, it's no worse than hypervisor escapes which become known every now and then.