[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/


More information about the cryptography mailing list