this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
38 points (97.5% liked)
Linux
48208 readers
734 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I wouldn't be so sure of that. CPU side channels allow data to be leaked across security contexts. For example, from a user process to sandboxed JavaScript in a browser, from kernel space to user space, or from one containerized process to another. This is a problem even on a single user system without any VMs.
Many years ago when I was still doing my undergrad I had a cyber security prof talk about side channels:
”There's no way to prevent side-channels. As long as two components are sharing the same physical resource there will be side channels. The only problem is that these side channels are leaking way more bits than we expected.”
So the question here is how big does the side channel need to be to leak something sensitive from memory? Turning off mitigations will almost certainly lead to larger side channels. Whether that is worth the risk is up to you.