[gmueckl]

I will be highly impressed if anyone managed to pull of a reliable and generic side channel attack based on the hardware you listed. Most of what you describe is squarely in the realm of tinfoil hattery.

DRAM and the memory bus is also affected by DMA operations running independently of the CPU.

Power consumption? There is no hardware available to measure that, let alone at the time resolution required. If you have to first attach a GHz bandwidth oscilloscope to the computer you might as well just reboot it or dump its RAM contents or whatever.

Forget about reprogramming a Wi-Fi chip. They operate on narrow channels in the 2.4GHz range and have fixed hardware for modulation. You would at least have to force the CPU to switch to the right frequency and then be lucky enough that it radiates a signal that demodulated to something sensible within the Wi-Fi hardware. This is physically impossible on current hardware.

Also, on a different note, we cannot sacrifice performance willy-nilly for the sake of a bit of potential security gains. A 30% performance loss on servers means that the counter move is to consume 30% more power to maintain current levels of operation in a data center. This energy needs to be generated, which means that someone is burning oil or gas for it with all the consequences. In essence, the current patches will result in an extra thousands or millions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. More efficient replacement hardware will eventually produced with extra environmental impact. We need to find ways to avoid that. Soon.