Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by colejohnson66 2349 days ago
> ...but I'm not sure I'd trust any code running in the same process space...

Can someone ELI5 how a separate process would fix Spectre/Meltdown?

1 comments

Spectre relies on being able to speculatively access data and extracting information about said data through a side channel despite the speculative execution not committing. A separate process means address spaces are separate, which means speculative execution cannot access the data.

Meltdown is similar, but because a CPU affected by Meltdown does not perform permission checks during speculative execution, you can read memory that the execution environment doesn't even have permissions for. E.g. kernel memory.

The fix for Spectre is thus to only consider address spaces a security boundary; interpreters or JITs cannot be considerd security boundaries any more (in general).