Re:Spectre mitigations murder userspace performance
by userbinator on Saturday June 19, 2021 @05:50PM
(#27564782)
address the issue of local applications attacking each other.
IMHO it's stupid to even try to isolate processes to that extent, as it's a really deep rabbithole that'll lead to worse performance and dubious increases in actual security. The best defense is to simply make everything running on the system be trusted.
Process protection boundaries should be for protection against accidental cross-process corruption, a form of reliability, and nothing more. That's effectively what the early 286/386 documentation stated, so Intel never even intended these protections to be defenses against side-channels in the first place.
Of course, the "security industry" needs to keep creating paranoia-fuel to justify their existence...
IMHO it's stupid to even try to isolate processes to that extent, as it's a really deep rabbithole that'll lead to worse performance and dubious increases in actual security. The best defense is to simply make everything running on the system be trusted.
Process protection boundaries should be for protection against accidental cross-process corruption, a form of reliability, and nothing more. That's effectively what the early 286/386 documentation stated, so Intel never even intended these protections to be defenses against side-channels in the first place.
Of course, the "security industry" needs to keep creating paranoia-fuel to justify their existence...