On 29 Jan 2020, at 09:37, Demi M. Obenour <demioben...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> What is the current status of seL4 with respect to Meltdown, Spectre,
> L1TF, MDS and other CPU vulnerabilities?

Meltdown defence has been implemented on x86 for two years (i.e. as soon as it 
was announced).

Where manufacturers sell broken hardware we cannot do better than adding 
workarounds after the fact. And verification has to assume sane behaviour of 
the hardware.

All the usual timing-channel attacks should be eliminated in a principled 
fashion, rather than adding workarounds for each published attack. This is the 
aim of our time-protection work, see 
https://ts.data61.csiro.au/projects/TS/timingchannels 
<https://ts.data61.csiro.au/projects/TS/timingchannels>

This is on-going research. We demonstrated the mechanisms that can do it, and 
working on
1) turning the mechanisms into a proper system model
2) verifying the implementation against a suitable hardware-software contract
3) getting manufacturers to accept and adhere to such a contract

All three are in progress. (3) is under active discussion at the RISC-V 
Foundation, with concrete proposals up for discussion probably within months. 
We hope this will force the hands of the x86 and Arm folks.

Gernot

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