The political problem is that if all operating systems do that, Intel has a pretty dud feature on their hands, and they are not particularly eager to accept that fact.
Hehehe... I cannot help but giigle abit, I didnt think this went that deep :o , definately interesting stuff regarding the future of HT and O/S Types,ty even though the answer may help someone else more, Regards, Drew B. (Enlightening myself to inspire others is my answer to everything *No-Comment*) On 5/14/05, Poul-Henning Kamp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Drew B. [Security Expe > rtise/Freelance Security research]." writes: > > >this sounds like trying to solve in the OS a problem that can only > >be solved in the application. Is there something more subtle > >that's going on? > > Well, the application could theoretically do something and Colin > advocated it this morning: make the crypto code footprint data > and key independent. While possible, it is both very tricky to > do (in particular in highlevel languages) and generally found > to be much slower than speed-optimized code. > > And while that could solve the immediate panic with OpenSSL and > similar, it does not solve the general problem that you can spy > very efficiently on the behaviour of another program. > > The fact that one user would be able to spy on another users editor > application and be able to extract for instance the word lengths > and layout of a document would also be considered a major security > problem in many installations. > > Or how about just being able to monitor another customers apache > instance to figure out how much traffic they get and which pages > they get it on ? > > The fundamental trouble is that HTT makes the spying far more > efficient than it is with SMP or even UP (I think we are talking > in the order of a million times more efficient). > > That takes the attack from the "if you were really lucky" to the > "almost always in first try" category. > > The correct (technical) workaround (IMO) is to restrict HTT to be > used only for threads from the same process. > > The political problem is that if all operating systems do that, > Intel has a pretty dud feature on their hands, and they are not > particularly eager to accept that fact. > > Poul-Henning > > -- > Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 > FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe > Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. > -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Drew B. Independant Security analysis,for Aussies. Security researcher/expert,threat-focus,Freelance. _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-security To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
