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A comment on New x86 micro-op vulnerability breaks all known Spectre defenses.

Re:New x86 micro-op vulnerability breaks all known Spectre d... by juancn on Sunday May 02, 2021 @02:05AM (#27012707)
This may sound stupid, but the commonality in all these side channel attacks is that high precision time keeping is a non privileged operation.

Maybe it’s time to make clocks a privileged op as a mitigation. Even making execution time non predictable on untrusted code, such as JavaScript?

If precise time keeping is unavailable these become harder to do.

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Re:New x86 micro-op vulnerability breaks all known Spectre d... by lukastr0 on Sunday May 02, 2021 @06:07AM (#27013829)
It is surprisingly difficult to make timekeeping unavailable. There are many methods, besides the official timer APIs, to get timing - as outlined in the paper "Fantastic Timers and where to find them" from TU Graz:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322000263_Fantastic...

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