[Cryptography] Buffer Overflows & Spectre

[Henry Baker]

At 04:27 AM 11/22/2018, Jerry Leichter wrote:
>Given the realities of today's hardware, one could imagine a "Cloud" in which you don't rent a VM:  You rent an actual piece of hardware (so-called "bare metal"), which runs your code and your code only.

Hmmm....

How can you tell when the "cloud" vendor is lying to you, and running your code in an VM simulation anyway ?

Remember, the whole economic rationale of early "cloud" vendors was to enable a multiplicity of lightly-loaded real hardware computers to be replaced by many fewer time-shared servers.  These vendors had to go to quite a bit of trouble to lie to the software to make it think each software system had the entire machine to itself.

I suspect that people are far easier to lie to than software systems are.