Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by adamsmith143 1470 days ago
So there is no possible set of instructions that could block the particular behavior in the exploit?
2 comments

You could maybe do it with lots of fences or just a ridiculous chain of NOPs after each branch such that the ROB is cleared before you have time to try to load a pointer speculatively.

In practice, both of these would probably kill performance, so I don't think either of these are great solutions. Recall we are targeting the kernel where everything needs to be as fast as possible.

This gets into the turing completeness tarpit. Yes, it's possible to make a vulnerable implementation emulate a chip that is not vulnerable. And maybe even detect when you don't need to emulate and run natively some of the time.