ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by dfrage on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @11:44PM (#19916238)

A friend and coworker of mine had a saying "Speed Kills" about trying too hard to make things fast while keeping the system robust. You most certainly can make more secure systems, as the merely superscalar and less intense CPUs are, but they're significantly slower.

All depends on your threat model; to take one extreme, if you're crunching numbers with your own optimized numeric code, the issue of untrusted code of "random JavaScript off the net" is not an issue. And I doubt many mainframes are used to casually browse the net ... I certainly hope not at the same time they run the night's financial transactions!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by kazagistar on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @12:02PM (#19920724)

With any cloud computing, they very well could be.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Inte... by dfrage on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @12:58PM (#19921374)

Good point, I was thinking in the context of owning your own (super)computer or mainframe and having control over what ran on it. In the cloud, which to us implies running in a VM with other tenants vs. for example dedicated machine(s) with other services bundled in, anything goes.

[ Parent | on HN ]