Re:MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulner...
by compiler-guy on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @02:10PM
(#19912146)
No. The security concern is attackers reading data they shouldn’t. The article explains how.
“Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) is a group of vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to potentially read sensitive data.”
That is way more serious than stealing cycles.
Re:MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulner...
by rightbyte on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @03:46PM
(#19913182)
Ye, but I didn't understand how this was different than Spectre, except with different caches.
Still it's fine with no JS and no shared processor time, right?
Re:MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulner...
by rurban on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @04:01PM
(#19913321)
Right. If you run no foreign code you are safe.
Re:MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulner...
by bloomer on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @02:40PM
(#19912506)
From a brief read, I think it reads in flight data not necessarily cached, so flushing cache won't help unfortunately.
Re:MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulner...
by silversconfused on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @02:39PM
(#19912486)
One CPU per process makes a lot more sense, especially now that we have so many specialized CPUs in our machines anyway.
Re:MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulner...
by rightbyte on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @03:39PM
(#19913110)
Ye I got a feeling that shared processor time with strangers is not viable without specialized hardware.
Re:MDS: Microarchitectural Data Sampling side-channel vulner...
by snovv_crash on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @05:40PM
(#19914139)
I think it isn't viable with non-deterministic (in time) hardware behavior. This means dedicated caches, or no caches at all. Dedicated guaranteed memory speeds and latencies. Dedicated processing units. The untrusted code cannot be affected by other code, otherwise the other code leaks its usage patterns across.
It should be up to the VM-as-a-service and browser vendors to flush the cache properly.