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by zaarn 2431 days ago
Well, for trusted code that doesn't expose any mechanism to run foreign code (ie browsers), spectre is largely a non-issue.

So the trusted core part of the OS can run without any spectre prevention, though you can still enable the various hardware protections available in the chicken bits.

And if it's necessary to protect against spectre attacks, you can use shim layers or even isolation into ring3 to take preventative measures. This allows leveraging performance were important and security where necessary.

If it's in webassembly, you can even run two versions of a driver; one with spectre-mitigations compiled in and one without, sharing one memory space and the kernel can choose to invoke either one depending on the call chain.
1 comments
zzzcpan 2431 days ago
Trusted code has to be free from vulnerabilities to be immune, so it's still an issue even for trusted code. And I'm pretty sure neither webassembly nor other sandboxing methods can fully mitigate speculative attacks on out-of-order CPUs within the same address space, you'd need a programming language with a compiler designed from scratch for it.
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zaarn 2431 days ago
Well, it doesn't have to be free from vulnerabilities, not any more than any other OS code. The sandboxed code that is running trusted (ie without trampolines and spectre-defenses) would still hold the guarantees given by the sandbox (WASM), which are pretty much on par with what a modern browser can do for JS and WASM. And keep in mind that both WASM and JS now have spectre-defenses, so there is no need for a PL from scratch for this.
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zzzcpan 2431 days ago
> And keep in mind that both WASM and JS now have spectre-defenses, so there is no need for a PL from scratch for this.

As far as I remember they weren't able to defend from side channel attacks within the same process completely and decided to rely on process isolation instead, estimating it would be too much work to address all known spectre class vulnerabilities on their existing compilers and too hard to ensure for defenses not to be broken later by compiler developers.

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