Intel CPUs impacted by new PortSmash side-channel vulnerability

Re:Intel CPUs impacted by new PortSmash side-channel vulnera... by greggyb on Friday November 02, 2018 @11:49AM (#18363879)

I have a somewhat naive question. Since this and many similar recent issues are associated with SMT (Spectre, Meltdown), and the concern is about malicious code being run on the same core.

Can IaaS vendors simply restrict VMs to always use whole cores. If you want 3 cores in your VM, you get

    1. Core0 Main thread
    2. Core0 Hyper thread
    3. Core1 Main thread
    Core1 Hyper thread is un-allocated

And then we don't have two actors on one core? Or just only offer 2-core VMs.

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Re:Intel CPUs impacted by new PortSmash side-channel vulnera... by wrs on Friday November 02, 2018 @11:59AM (#18364007)

“Google Compute Engine employs host isolation features which ensure that an individual core is never concurrently shared between distinct virtual machines.”

(https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/protecting-agains...)

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Re:Intel CPUs impacted by new PortSmash side-channel vulnera... by johncslack on Friday November 02, 2018 @12:17PM (#18364214)

Yep, that's an important part of the approach used in Azure and Hyper-V.

Full details: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2018/08/1...

Disclosure: Microsoft, Hyper-V team

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Re:Intel CPUs impacted by new PortSmash side-channel vulnera... by wmf on Friday November 02, 2018 @11:52AM (#18363925)

It looks like EC2 is already doing this. I don't think they ever shared cores except for t1 and t2.

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