Re:Lucet: Native WebAssembly Compiler and Runtime
by haimez on Thursday March 28, 2019 @10:23PM
(#19518608)
Even interprocess isolation is not a solved problem in the face of SMT (hyperthreading), so yes- there is none. You simply can’t deliver these kinds of shared metal products and defend against cache timing attacks. You also can’t deliver these kinds of products at this price and be profitable without sharing metal, so here we are. If you care about being isolated, you can’t share hardware- simple as that.
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Re:Lucet: Native WebAssembly Compiler and Runtime
by kllrnohj on Friday March 29, 2019 @01:00AM
(#19519262)
There's a huge difference in viability & mitigations here, though. In a shared metal system a portsmash attack isn't likely to be practically viable, and worst case is sched affinity or similar is used to just firewall off processes from co-inhabiting the same physical core. Kernel scheduler could even do this in a clever way, this has a very clear path to which it is basically fully mitigated.
So all signs point to shared metal still being viable security-wise, with mitigations either already deployed or pretty straightforward. Shared hardware will remain totally fine.
Shared-process, though, nobody is really talking about making that viable from a security perspective.