[Cryptography] Crypto for optimistic transactions ?

Bill Frantz frantz at pwpconsult.com
Sat Jan 6 18:09:30 EST 2018


On 1/6/18 at 10:55 PM, hyc at symas.com (Howard Chu) wrote:

>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.

The Spectre attack can use "Return Oriented Programming", which 
is used to empower buffer overrun attacks on systems which don't 
allow execution from read/write pages. See the Spectre paper 
below. Note that instead of overlaying the stack, the Spectre 
attack sets the addresses in the branch prediction table in the 
processor. No write access to victim memory needed.


For those who like unfiltered information about these problems:

Spectre: <https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf>
Meltdown: <https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4343429/Meltdown-paper.pdf>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz        | "I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn 
up the
408-356-8506       | intelligence.  There's a knob called 
"brightness", but
www.pwpconsult.com | it doesn't work. -- Gallagher



More information about the cryptography mailing list