[Cryptography] Did Spectre help torpedo Qualcomm?

[Christian Huitema]

On 9/29/2018 9:55 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Henry Baker:
>
>> I wonder if the server chips Qualcomm developed were hopelessly
>> haunted by Spectre?
> I find that extremely unlikely.  There is a point (regarding cost or
> power efficiency) at which most customers would stop caring.  The
> whole zoo of issues is now largely perceived as a software problem
> anyway.

Except Spectre is not really a software problem. Check the paper in ACM
Queue,
"C Is Not a Low-level Language"
(https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479),
in which David Chisnall explains the rather large distance between what
the C
programmers believe they are writing and what is actually executed. Spectre
is an attack on that interstitial layer, a layer that software does not
see with
bugs that software can hardly fix.

-- Christian Huitema


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