[Cryptography] Crypto for optimistic transactions ?
Howard Chu
hyc at symas.com
Sat Jan 6 01:55:25 EST 2018
Tom Mitchell wrote:
> A third landmark goal is to design hardware that does not take the 5-35% perf
> hit. Whoever solves this
> first will sell a lot of hardware including motherboard and DRAM makers. But
> this will put a chill on
> sales for months.
That 5-35% number is the effect of the patches to mitigate Meltdown, which
primarily affects Intel (and also ARM's Cortex-A75). AMD clearly demonstrates
that there's a right way to handle things, since their chips don't have this
problem.
The Spectre attack is harder to defend against, but it can only reveal memory
within a single process's address space, so for the most part I find it a
non-event. It only becomes a problem if you allow hostile code to be injected
into your running processes. Web browsers are the most obviously vulnerable,
particularly when they allow user-loaded extensions and executing javascript
etc. from random web sites. In that respect the attack surface is nothing new,
and we already know about isolating browser tabs/pages into their own
processes to mitigate such types of attacks.
--
-- Howard Chu
CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/
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