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by vitus 539 days ago
> This effort, along with a move to prevent timing attacks, led to JavaScript engines intentionally making timing inaccurate, so hackers can’t get precise measurements of the current computers performance or how expensive a certain operation is.

The primary motivation for limiting timer resolution was the rise of speculative execution attacks (Spectre / Meltdown), where high-resolution timers are integral for differentiating between timings within the memory hierarchy.

https://github.com/google/security-research-pocs/tree/master...

If you look at when various browsers changed their timer resolutions, it's entirely a response to Spectre.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-lan...

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40556716 (SSCA -> "speculative side channel attacks")