Another micro-architecture attack. Since the advent of Spectre and Meltdown, I really wonder what is the practicality of exploiting these vulnerabilities. As an end-user, if I have malware running on my machine trying to trigger these exploits, then in many ways I have already lost. The malware program has access to all my personal data anyway.

Personally I wonder whether the cost of mitigation is worth it. According to the article (and their simplified HT methodology) certain workloads experience a 25% performance hit.

The only cases I currently consider as exploitable are VMs in the cloud (perhaps a reason to own dedicated servers after all this time) and running JS in the browser (perhaps a reason to disable JS).

There will always be side-channel attacks. Our devices are physical devices and will leak side-effects, like electromagnetic radiation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename) ). This recent spate of MDS flaws don't necessarily fit in my threat model.