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>> These attacks leak information through micro-architectural side-channels which we show are not mere bugs, but in fact lie at the foundation of optimization.

So we'll need to have non-speculative execution for cloud CPUs and stronger efforts to keep untrusted code off our high performance CPUs. This may even lead to chips with performance cores and trusted cores.

No. The paper notes that Spectre can, and will in the future be able to defeat all programming language level techniques of isolation. With properly designed OoO, Spectre cannot defeat process isolation. The fundamental lesson that everyone must take to heart is that in the future, any code running on a system, including things like very high-level languages running on interpreters, always have full read access to the address space of the process they run in. Process isolation is the most granular security boundary that actually works.

Or in other words, running javascript interpreters in the same address space as where you manage crypto is not something that can be done. Running code from two different privilege levels in the same VM is not something that can be done. Whenever you need to run untrusted code, you need to spin up a new OS-managed process for it.

So this is something that I've never gotten a full answer to: what is the difference between a "thread" and a "process" in this model?

This isn't a facetious question. A thread is just, at its core, a process that shares memory with another process. (In fact, this is how threads are implemented on Linux.) But all, or virtually all, processes also share memory with other processes. Text pages of DLLs are shared between processes. Browser processes have shared memory buffers, needed for graphics among other things.

What separates processes that share memory from threads that share memory regarding Spectre? Is it the TLB flush when switching between processes that doesn't occur between threads? Or something else?

For meltdown (spectre v3, iirc) It's not so much sharing memory as sharing address space. Processes have different page tables. Threads within a process share page tables.

For spectre v1 and v2, right now (on existing hardware) mostly nothing separates threads from processes. In the future, process isolation is a good candidate for designing hardware + system software such that different processes are isolated (via partitioning the caches, etc).

You probably still want threads within a process to share cache hits.

The threat model is: A code triggering spectre v1 gets read access to the entire address space currently mapped in. ^*

Since process boundaries are enforced by not mapping any ram not usable by the process, this means they don't get violated by spectre v1. If you have two threads which only share part of their address space, the unshared part is protected. Any executable or library mapped into multiple processes is readable from any of them.

^*: With modern cpus, multiple processes can be mapped in simultaneously using ASIDs, however this doesn't matter because they work as they should and properly isolate the processes. You can just assume the model "only one process is mapped at a time".

"Text pages of DLLs are shared between processes"

I thought this wasn't possible with ASLR'd relocations all over the place in the text?

> With properly designed OoO, Spectre cannot defeat process isolation

It's worth noting that no existing or announced common hardware is "properly designed" according to this condition. Even the "fixed" Intel hardware that's been announced is still vulnerable to spectre v1 across process boundaries.

> It's worth noting that no existing or announced common hardware is "properly designed" according to this condition. Even the "fixed" Intel hardware that's been announced is still vulnerable to spectre v1 across process boundaries.

AMD Zen is.

Spectre v1 (bounds check bypass) only works inside processes. All it allows you to do is to read any memory location currently mapped into your address space, and so it gives anything that can execute code complete read access to the address space of the process it's running in. On Intel CPUs, this also allows reading the kernel address space, unless kpti is used. Eventually, the ability to read kernel memory will be removed, and so kpti becomes unneccessary.

On all AMD post-BD cpus, spectre v1 cannot be used to read kernel address space.

All the rest of spectre (and meltdown) can eventually be fixed, but it is effectively impossible to make a cpu that is both fast and doesn't exhibit spectre v1.

I'm not aware of a spectre v1 attack for the altair 8800, or indeed any of the CPU's of that era, Z80, 6502, 8086/8....

But then, things moved on, standard ways to add more cache with multiple cores was lapped up and later on we found a design flaw that echoed back for a decade or more upon all these multi-core CPU's.

Though in fairness and to put some context upon all this, CPU design is more complex than writing TAX laws. Yet we have exploits for TAX laws appearing and used all the time by large corporations. Whilst the comparison is not ideal and some would say, unfair. It does highlight that nothing is perfect and what we may class as perfect today (or darn close), could and may very well be classed as swiss cheese in the future. It gets down to how far away that future is. After all, we still have encryption utilised that we have (on paper) shown to be flawed to future quantum CPU's! But in a World that was aware of Y2k decades before the event, the penchant of business to drive everything to the last minute for profit will always be a factor in advancements. After all, if CPU cores had isolated caches instead of sharing, then that would mitigate so many issues, yet it would cost more to make and most consumers would not appreciate the extra cost for what to them is little value in return above and beyond the cheaper solution. That's business for you and CPU's are made by them for profit.

>> The paper notes that Spectre can, and will in the future be able to defeat all programming language level techniques of isolation.

That's why I said we need trusted cores - i.e. ones that don't implement speculative execution or share cache with other cores. Untrusted code needs to be run in physical isolation, not just virtual isolation.

But the real solution to all of this is not to run untrusted code at all. This raises the question of how we come to trust the code we run. The simplest and most obvious thing we need to do is disable javascript. I mean how can you possibly trust code that came in a 3rd party payload used for advertising? How can you trust anything from Facebook? Or any of them? The answer is that you can't and in may cases should not.

What about languages that prevent the program from reading the current time or determining whether some local computation finished before or after some external event? (I'm thinking of something like Haskell code that's executing outside of the IO monad.)

Perhaps we just need to have a more restricted idea about what untrusted code is allowed to do.

In concept this could work. In practice, you bassicly need to design the language (or at least compiler and runtime) with this in mind from the beggining, otherwise you might forget about some backdoor.

Eg, if you do Haskell and just verify the function you are running is not in the IO monad, you might miss some usage of UnsafePerformIO. Even if you check their code, if you let them specify dependencies they might manages to sneak a buggy use of UnsafePerformIO into a library they submitted to hackage.

Plus, your restriction is essentially: no clock, no contact with the outside world, no threading, and a carefully considered interface to the host program to prevent time leaks.

For many usecases, this is not workable

Putting aside the fact that I don't think you're actually disagreeing with the parent, I don't think it's really accurate to say that all programming level techniques of isolation are defeatable. The paper enumerates a specific set of vulnerable language features (e.g. "Indexed data structures with dynamic bounds checks"). The paper doesn't say much about languages lacking these features. Also, I believe retpoline is a (nearly?) perfect software fix for Intel's microarchitecture.
>and will in the future be able to defeat

umm, "on today's hardware"

Processor affinity would become a security-influenced decision with a CPU like that. That would allow for a whole new class of bugs.
>> Processor affinity would become a security-influenced decision with a CPU like that.

Yes it would.

>> That would allow for a whole new class of bugs.

I think it's necessary, but not easy.

Actually what I think is necessary is for people to stop running code from random places - or even common places. Google could work without running stuff on my machine.

For some types of work, it means there's still a case for on-prem/"private cloud".

Pick two: performance, safety, convenience.

The paper states: confidentiality, integrity, availability
...when discussing something different than what I was.
I hope they still offer CPUs optimised for the non Cloud scenario, where all the programs running are trusted and so these sorts of attacks (which requires local access) are not applicable.
Outside of some very niche scenarios, does this usecase even exist? Certainly nothing running a javascript enabled browser, electron app, or in general any VM of any sort qualifies.
All the VMs run on my employer's servers are running code we trust. None of them run arbitrary code from some third party, because we're not a cloud provider, nor are they used to browse the web. I don't want to slow them down to mitigate vulnerabilities that just aren't a serious risk or even applicable.
Do you guys audit the whole stack then?
Most HPC stuff likely (in my experience) fits this scenario.
any art creation workflow ? e.g. music, video production, 3d modeling & rendering, etc...
I'm curious if this leads to us re-visiting more Itanium-like CPU designs.
No, it won't, because OoO with process isolation is still superior to Itanium-like in all respects.
How about CPUs without speculative execution and simultaneous multithreading (SMT / Hyper-Threading, which has similar issues)? We would, of course, need other optimizations to claw back the performance loss--an engineering problem I feel we can solve.

I've wondered if the solution is more, simpler cores. We concentrate on smaller, faster cores, and the programming to utilize them better. Perhaps advances in memory architectures as well. Hardware isn't my specialty, so I'm just brainstorming here.

Perhaps this is where ARM and even RISC-V based systems can step in.

But I'm a software guy, so what do I know? I just know I'd feel more comfortable with systems based on simpler CPUs that just cannot be exploited by the recent side-channel attacks discovered, rather than trying playing whack-a-mole with patches, along with trying to reason when it might be safe to use CPUs with these optimizations.

I don't know why this is being down-voted.

A few things: ARM and RISC-V definitely have specEx baked in (though you can not include SpecEx module on RISC-V). There are interesting alternatives to SpecEx. DSPs use delay slots, and I've seen delay slots used quite well in a GP-CPU. Getting high instruction saturation on a CPU with delay slots is a "hard compiler problem", but I have a few things to say about that:

Despite jokes about "better compilers", compilers are getting better (e.g. polyhedral optimization). One way to think of what OOOex/SpecEx is that it's figuratively the CPU JITting your code on the fly. The most popular programming language JITs aggresively anyways so one wonders if there isn't some reduplication going on.

Furthermore, the most popular programming language isn't entirely the most raw-power performant, and it's pretty clear that in our current ecosystem just pushing operations through the FPU (which is what x86 optimizes for) isn't necessarily the most important thing in the world; uptime, reliability, fault-tolerance, safe paralellization, distribution, and power conservation might be more important moving forward.

HM, oops, apparently RISC-V has OOOEx, not SpecEx.

I understand this is nitpicking, but it's not accurate to say "RISC-V has speculative execution" or "ARM has OoO execution" and that they therefore suffer from spectre and friends.

RISC-V/ARM are specifications of instruction sets, for which there exists an enormous domain of possible implementations. Spectre/Meltdown are not inherent features of Instruction set architectures. They are emergent properties of certain implementations of those instruction set architectures.

For example, the BOOM implementation of RISC-V does out of order execution. The Rocket chip implementation does not. Both implement the RISC-V architecture.

I'm not replying to you specifically. But I see this sort of thing on HN all the time and I feel like it's an important distinction to make.

Thank you, I should have been more careful. Spectre and meltdown are in fact specific interactions that happen because OOO and specex are hard and it's easy to mess up given the high level of statefulness and complexity in contemporary chip designs (in this case - memory caching). But ooo and specex make chip architectures difficult to reason about and I'm sure more errors will emerge.
> Despite jokes about "better compilers", compilers are getting better

The compiler has to make static decisions. The hardware knows what is actually happening. There is an inherent information asymmetry at work that a "sufficiently smart" compiler seems unlikely to overcome.

My intuition says software can't beat the speed of a superscalar OOO CPU anymore than a GP CPU can beat a roughly equivalent DSP for algorithms suitable to run on the DSP, but I have no proof for that.

I'll also note that we've been promised "smarter compilers" for decades. Intel has tried that route several times. No one has ever made it work.

> The compiler has to make static decisions.

Pretty sure I mentioned JITting in my comment.

> My intuition says software can't beat the speed of a superscalar OOO CPU anymore

How good is good enough? I mean we have distributed tensor flow which is basically on the fly compilation that can reorganize your computational graph around nodes with gpus separated by network latency, or Julia where you can drop in a GPUarray as a datatype and move computation to the GPU without changing your code.

If we go to something a bit more baroque, java is within 1.5 of c/c++ these days

Could you hand roll a better solution? Probably. Would it be worth it? Doubtful.

I think it's definitely worth exploring this angle because modern JIT compilers have become very advanced, and there's still a lot of juice left to squeeze there. Look at some of the things Graal is doing and it looks a lot like what OOO speculation is doing - it'll recompile branches on the fly based on profiling information and things like that.
It is a natural alternative. The "simpler but more cores" project works on paper (i.e. potential instruction throughput). In reality it falls apart for variety of reasons. The most fundamental is because of the difficulty of exploiting thread-level parallelism. The complex Out-of-Order cores do a really good job of improving throughput by finding independent instructions to execute in parallel. The path-to-parallelism is much easier at the granularity of instructions than at the granularity of cores. Parallel programming is hard. Amadahls law cannot be avoided except through ----- speculation, so we are back to complexity again.
> In reality it falls apart for variety of reasons.

On the contrary, the "many wimpy cores" approach has been very successful on GPUs (and other vector processors such as TPUs, etc.) What it hasn't been successful at is running existing software unmodified.

The best solution (the one we use today, in fact) seems to be a hybrid approach. We have a few powerful cores to run sequential code and many weaker units (often vector units; e.g. GPUs and SIMD) to run parallel code. Not all algorithms can be parallelized, so we'll likely always need a few fast sequential cores. But a lot of code can.

Amdahl's law for sure. We all know most software sucks, so in this vision (simpler cores), that reduces us to taking the performance hit and optimizing elsewhere. For example, older ARM-based systems do not use speculative execution, and can handle encryption and video transcoding though co-processors.
Side-channel attacks are some of the most terrifying to me, because fundamentally your code works fine, it's just some detail in the timing that gives away information. At least with buffer overflows there are automated ways to try and find them, like fuzz testing. It's not perfect, but at least it's something to try and validate you are doing the right thing. Is there some sort of fuzz testing that could potentially find side-channel timing attacks? Maybe some sort of statistical analysis on the timing results? I found this https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.07005.pdf but it seems to be fairly recent, and I don't know how mature this area is.
One of the interesting aspects of quantum computing is that it upgrades these issues into actual bugs. Bit flips are errors in the Z basis, and phase flips (information leaks) are errors in the X basis. [1][2]

Trying to build large scale quantum computers could lead to styles of optimization that provably don't have side channel issues.

[1]: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3327

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPw9nkJAwDY

Has there been an in-the-wild exploit found for many of these micro-arch side channel attacks?

I still have reservations that Specter can be actually exploited, and certainly not by JavaScript running in a browser it seems (even without the timing fixes -- just too much noise in the system to get a real world exploit). All the proof of concepts I saw effectively needed a running start (and a much lower bar to clear). I'm still not sure if we are just making too much out of many of these attacks.

Also, many of these exploits require running native code to really even be possible, and a JIT offers a large degress of protection. Most of the machines I use, if you are already able to run native code, the battle has already been lost.

I think the security community can sometimes have Chicken Little syndrome. I most definitely wouldn't want performance enhancing techniques that might have side-channel vulnerabilities to not be produced or used because they might be exploitable in a use case (eg, web serving and rendering) that doesn't fit most others (eg, internal servers).

> I still have reservations that Specter can be actually exploited

It's not easy, and many systems are more easily broken into by other means (e.g., unpatched known-vulnerable programs). But people are already demonstrating exploits; it's not theoretical.

> and certainly not by JavaScript running in a browser it seems (even without the timing fixes -- just too much noise in the system to get a real world exploit).

Your faith is unwarranted. The paper itself evaluated JavaScript as implemented by v8, which is used by Chrome: "as part of our defensive work, we implemented a number of the described mitigations in the V8 JavaScript virtual machine and evaluated their performance penalties. As we’ve noted, none of these mitigations provide comprehensive protection against Spectre, and so the mitigation space is a frustrating performance / protection trade-off."

Also, modern statistics is pretty amazing at removing noise. Don't make claims about "too much noise" until you've tried them.

> Most of the machines I use, if you are already able to run native code, the battle has already been lost.

Perhaps, but many others are in a different circumstance.

We've moved to a world where people run on clouds (shared machines with your enemy) and automatically run JavaScript provided by malicious parties. This isn't hopeless. You can run on clouds but run on temporarily-isolated CPUs so there's no leak. A lot of applications can be easily written to work without JavaScript (though many can't, and many developers have no idea that this might be desirable). For many, providing confidentiality when the CPUs always leak is a real problem.

> I think the security community can sometimes have Chicken Little syndrome.

That's certainly true. These are not easy to exploit today, especially given some mitigations. But think of these as warning shots - these are problems for which there is NO practical full mitigation today. It would be unwise to ignore the problem. Attackers are likely to gradually get better at exploiting this over time, and if that happens, the only solution available is to NOT share CPUs running programs (disable JavaScript and use more-expensive isolated-CPU clouds) OR replace most CPUs with CPUs that do not yet exist.

> I most definitely wouldn't want performance enhancing techniques that might have side-channel vulnerabilities to not be produced or used because they might be exploitable in a use case (eg, web serving and rendering) that doesn't fit most others (eg, internal servers).

Understandable, and that may be just fine for your situation. However, most systems try to use least privilege to reduce damage (e.g., if you break into one component, you don't get everything). This attack makes it easier to breach such isolation - so even in that case, you might have reason to be concerned.

The sky is not falling, at least not today. But there are reasons to be concerned.

The article states in Section 4.5 (Page 20):

As part of our offensive work, we developed proofs of concept in C++, JavaScript, and WebAssembly for all the reported vulnerabilities. We were able to leak over 1KB/s from variant 1 gadgets in C++ using rdtsc with 99.99% accuracy and over 10B/s from JavaScript using a low resolution timer.

This is nice, but is there a real world exploit, not a POC? Example: pulling session cookies for another site, or extracting an SSH private key?
What are you basing this unearned confidence on? We've seen this same pattern repeat thousands of times:

1. This might be a vulnerability in theory but there's no POC 2. Well it's just a POC, no one has actually weaponized this. 3. Sure someone weaponized this but it is very difficult to pull off. 4. Oh the script-kiddie toolkits can build exploits for this automatically. Who could have seen it coming?!?

(Step #2 is probably where the various governmental spying agencies start deploying the exploit in targeted ways)

Perhaps this time things are different but it seems unlikely.

There has not been an instance of a real world exploit being run (e.g, you don't know what memory address you are attacking and the system is running under a real world load), and I saw a release by a con sec company (can't remember which one) that said they haven't seen any indication anybody was trying this in the wild either.

There is so much that needs to line up to get Specter to work in Javascript that I'm at the point that I don't think it is possible.

Everybody keep saying that the POC shows it is possible and that a real world exploit is easy after that. But Specter has been around for a year now, and nobody has yet to even get close to make a working exploit that didn't require some large leaps of faith.

And every time you bring this up, you get voted into the floor in HN. I get it. Specter is very cool, almost magical, but coolness doesn't make it any more likely to work.

I agree that Spectre is somewhat overblown. It's something that we should be working on mitigating, to be sure, but it is very difficult to exploit. Memory safety issues, in practice, are significantly easier to find, so that's what attackers go for. We're not in a "drop everything, all hands on deck" situation.