Meltdown and Spectre exploits were presented in detail at Papers We Love Seattle (3-1-2018 
) by George Reilly. slides
My takeaway from George's presentation at PWL. The real risk is in hostile parties using these attacks to steal information (such as private keys) - not to control a system. Threat levels are understated in public cloud. Businesses using multi-tenancy should ask providers what Meltdown and Spectre remediation they have taken. Desktop threats are overstated. page
SGX programming environment
Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) aim to provide nextgen security through isolated execution through a memory enclave in the CPU. Code in the enclave can interact with applications. Application cannot reach into the enclave, all ones are returned, requesting threads thrown away. Hear about the design in the video.
YOUTUBE mPT_vJrlHlg Frank Mckeen of Intel @ Stanford CS Gates Apr 16, 2015
- Problem Statement - Attack Surface and Overview - Programming environment - System programming view - Day in the life of an enclave - SGX Access Control & Off Chip protections - Attestation and Sealing 54:00 - Developing with SGX - Summary
A canonical show case for SGX is Sawtooth PoET. Proof of elapsed time consensus algorithm, aimed at overcoming the energy inefficiencies in Bitcoin PoW and Ethereum PoS. PoET
Alas, Researchers have found SGX can be used to Conceal Cache Attacks. paper
.
ToDo: Reprise the mitigation from microprocessor to OS to JavaScript. Are the mitigations capabilities-based?
Dr. SGX offers mitigations ...wikipedia