If this is your security mechanism (chuckle), then attackers will just slow themselves down by duty cycling. Say, only attacking for 100ms at a time, then sleeping a second. You'd never know.

...making it even more unlikely the attack would find anything of value (or even recognisable as such) in a reasonable amount of time.

To use an analogy, these side-channel timing attacks are really a "looking for a needle in a haystack" (or heap...) situation, except that [1] you don't necessarily know what a needle looks like, and [2] the haystack is constantly changing. AFAIK all the PoCs shown so far relied on having a deep knowledge of the system and carefully constructed conditions.

If these attacks could undetectably dump all of your RAM in a few seconds, that would definitely be a huge concern. But they're more like being able to read a few bytes per second, from somewhere in the address space, with no idea what they are or where they're being read from, and no guarantee that they're even contiguous.

I don’t think that’s a good safety heuristic.

I agree that it's not good, yet anecdotally I've realized that a device has been compromised by running `top`, on Windows and on Linux. It's not a good heurestic because it's only disvoverable post-compromise.

I’ve discovered a compromise before because of the fans going full speed on a server.

> Yes, but your fans would start spinning like mad. I kill any browser that does that.

Good lord, I hope this is satire.

I think they mean the browser window/process. I also tend to kill off tabs that do this.

I can’t tell you how many startup’s splash page animations have actually caused my PC fans to spin at maximum. What is this website possibly doing with all my available computing power?

Why would you fans start spinning? You can extract data at at least hundreds of MB/s with these exploits, you wouldn't know.

That's the first time I have heard a number this high for these exploits. All prior numbers I've heard were many orders of magnitude smaller, more like byte/s. The article linked above cites 1 kB/s as novel.

That was a number I heard (Meltdown pre-mitigations) when the "oh shit" papers started dropping a few years ago, could be misremembering. I'm also still slightly inebriated so thank you for nerdsniping me (Lit Review time!)