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Google Researchers Say Software Alone Can't Mitigate Spectre Chip Flaws (siliconrepublic.com)
A group of researchers say that it will be difficult to avoid Spectre bugs in the future unless CPUs are dramatically overhauled. From a report: Google researchers say that software alone is not enough to prevent the exploitation of the Spectre flaws present in a variety of CPUs. The team of researchers -- including Ross McIlroy, Jaroslav Sevcik, Tobias Tebbi, Ben L Titzer and Toon Verwaest -- work on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. The researchers presented their findings in a paper distributed through ArXiv and came to the conclusion that all processors that perform speculative execution will always remain susceptible to various side-channel attacks, despite mitigations that may be discovered in future.
Is my understanding not correct? I thought that these vulnerabilities were due to processors not applying memory access controls during speculative execution. For me personally, I was very surprised to find out that memory access controls could be bypassed at all. Isn't it just a matter of always applying memory access controls? Isn't that why the access control is in the hardware?
We need to get away from this unsigned, unreviewed, wild code (like javascript) running on your machines. Lock it down and stuff like this won't be a problem.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I'm assuming at this point we're probably at least a couple of CPU generations away from Intel fixing this properly.
unfortunately, it's much wose than the press is making out. i've had to investigate this in-depth as part of the design of the libre-riscv soc, because we criically rely on out-of-order execution for the vectorisation. i was shocked to learn that even in-order systems are potentially vulnerable to timing attacks.
the first thing that people need to get absolutely clear: spectre was *just the first* in a *class* of timing attacks that opened researchers and hardware designers eyes to a blind-spot in computing architectures.
the definition of a timing attack is as follows: one instruction may affect the completion time of past OR future instructions through resource starvation / contention, OR through state not being reset after use to a known uniform initial state.
the FIRST spectre attacks were against memory and caches, on speculative designs.
however it is perfectly possible, for example, for a multi-issue IN-ORDER system to have insufficient numbers of register ports, such that a certain unique combination of instructions may be arranged by an attacker to starve future instructions of the ability to complete instructions in a uniform time... and REQUIRE that they stall.
by forcing instructions to stall, that is the very DEFINITION of a timing attack.
against an *IN-ORDER* design.
now, it is possible to put in place certain speculation mitigation barriers in hardware, however these barriers *ONLY* occur at interrupts, exceptions and, at a software / OS level, on "context switches". hence the reason why this paper says that no matter what hardware designers try to do, *intra-process* attacks simply CANNOT be mitigated without moving to an *INTER*-process software security model.
FastCGI is toast, basically.
there is a solution, and it's going to require a massive world-wide campaign to introduce a concept to the entire computing software world: the creation of intra-process speculation barriers. if we wish to keep using FastCGI, and if we wish to keep using Firefox and python-gevent (the single-process paradigm), we *need* a hardware instruction that "quiesces" internal state *AS IF* the hardware had just made a context-switch, terminating all speculative execution, resetting all internal state and so on.
one way in which that may be possible to do in an out-of-order system that does not have such hardware-assisted in-process speculation barrier instructions is to issue about a hundred NOPs. the back-lash against doing so will be extreme, however it's not like there's much of a choice, here.
bottom line is: this has been a major, major oversight by the entire computing industry for over 25 years. it's a problem *across the entire industry*, not just Intel, not just AMD, it's *everybody*. it's not going to be fixed in a couple of hardware revisions by one company.