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Comment by jotm | Hacker News Reader

What actual data can be extracted by a Meltdown/Spectre attack? Still need to find an answer to that, nothing online says anything specific.

Datacenters should probably be worried, but what about the hundreds of millions of users out there? Doesn't seem like a big deal, tbh - until an actual exploit is out there, why should they worry?

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Meltdown allows userland native code (the Javascript your browser loads from random websites is JIT'd down to native code) to dump kernel memory.

It is worth clarifying, when people talk about "kernel memory", for x86-64 it really means all of memory, because all of physical memory is mapped into the kernel's address space. So really, meltdown allows userland code to read anything in memory.

Incorrect. When people talk about kernel memory, they are talking about pages marked as supervisor in the page tables for a particular process. That is not "anything in memory."

I think you missed the "all of physical memory is mapped into the kernel's address space"

For a typical kernel without Meltdown mitigations, the entire kernel, including that window into all of physical memory, is in the page tables of every 64 bit process at all times.

Meltdown allows applications to read any mapped pages, regardless of the protection bits on those pages. That mainly means kernel memory, which is the only page set that's normally unreadable. The kernel mapping normally includes all of physical memory.

How do people find the addresses to even start probing for stuff like this?

Theoretically, any application data stored in memory. An example might be a key used to encrypt user data server-side. The scary part of this attack is how it basically breaks the assumptions that most software was written under around memory isolation. Consider an AWS instance that shares a physical system with a different customer’s instance.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and basically everyone else is scrambling to fix these issues because of the potential. Basically, it’s going to take years to cover the long tail for this issue, and waiting until exploit kits are commonplace isn’t necessary to understand the potential impact.

The page from the researchers is your best source: https://meltdownattack.com/. I also recommend reading the actual papers (https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf and https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf). I haven't gotten to the Spectre paper yet, but the Meltdown paper is excellent, readable, and clear.

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