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by gitgudnubs
2293 days ago
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Almost, but plenty of computer architects speculated about vulnerabilities in speculative execution. It just seemed infeasible. The attack can differ based on the particular architecture (cache hierarchy, associativity, latency per instruction, buffer sizes...), clock speed, microcode, workloads, temperature, and a thousand other variables. Spectre was more impressive than a new idea: it was a brilliant execution of an idea that every architect eventually had. Rowhammer was similar. Everyone knew that it was possible to get boned by physics, but it can happen at an arbitrary place in an arbitrary way that isn't captured by any model. Rowhammer wasn't impressive because it was an idea, but because it was a simple, obvious in retrospect, way to exploit physics to bypass the models. |
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I remember reading papers in the mid to later 90s on just this topic, in regard to processing on top secret systems.
Most of the infeasiblility at the time was of running code on remote systems at the same time. Things like javascript were not everywhere at the time and most computers only had one core.