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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there is an impedance mismatch between what CPU designers think memory protection guarantees and what developers think memory protection offers. For production code, I never got much higher level than “C with classes” and if you asked me 15 years ago if leaking bits of information through the branch predictor or memory buffer was a failure to conform to the x86 memory protection model I would’ve said no. Memory protection is mainly there to keep one app from crashing another. If you’ve got untrusted machine code running on your system, you’ve already been compromised. I feel like CPU designers are still in that mindset. They still measure their success by how well they do on SPEC.

Maybe instead of slowing everything down for the sake of JavaScript, we need a special privilege mode for untrusted code that disables speculative execution, sharing a core with another hyper-thread, etc.

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> If you’ve got untrusted machine code running on your system, you’ve already been compromised.

You are exactly correct. However, the advent of "The Cloud" changed that.

"The Cloud" by definition runs untrusted machine code right next to yours. IBM and other players have been screaming about Intel being insecure for decades--and it fell on deaf ears.

Well, suck it up buttercup, all your data are belong to us.

While I hear lots of whingeing, I don't see IBM's volumes rising as people move off of Intel chips onto something with real security. When it comes down to actually paying for security, people still blow it off.

And so it goes.

I kind of blame Google for creating the whole trend of hosting all this mission critical stuff on x86 PCs: https://www.pcworld.com/article/112891/article.html. (Altavista was run in DEC iron. Google pioneered running these services in disposable commodity hardware.) That being said, POWER got hit with some of this stuff too.

Speaking about Google, how vulnerable are they, and how many CPUs will they need to replace?

Did someone already demonstrate that speculative-execution bugs are observable in Google's cloud stack?

Why should people move to IBM? Remember, their POWER processors were also vulnerabile to both Meltdown and L1TF - IBM systems are probably the only non-Intel servers that were. (Note that I really do mean non-Intel here, since AMD wasn't affected.) Their z/OS mainframes were probably vulnerable too but they don't release public information security about them. The only reason no researchers had discovered this is that IBM hardware is too expensive to test.

Red Hat released info about z/OS mainframes, they're also vulnerable to Meltdown as well as Spectre. ARM also has one new design that's vulnerable to Meltdown, and everyone has Spectre vulnerable designs.

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