> Side-channel attacks [20],[21], [22], [23], [24], [25] are beyond the scope of the paper
If all current hardware (i.e. OOO and caches) is vulnerable to speculative side-channel attacks, how they dare to say that is secure? With current hardware, nothing is secure (full stop)
Though they seem to be familiar enough with the real world to have known that would have sounded overly grandiose. I think what they really meant was something like "Provably Implements Whatever Security Boundaries That It Claims To".
The software is provably secure. That doesn't mean a complete solution consisting of software and hardware is necessarily secure, and it has never meant that.
The hardware issue is terrifying. And the worst part, it seems not possible to fix it without trowing away decades of performance enhancements. This epic screw-up of epic dimensions from computer architecture guys won't go away that easy.
You leave so much performance on the table if you demand cryptographically secure perf for everything. That means no caching, everything runs in fixed, worst case time, and the amount of work must be fixed as well so there is not any variation in power draw.
Here is a simpler solution - do not run untrusted code on your computer. It is just that easy™.
PS: I disable JavaScript by default in my browser, and manually whitelist exceptions, for the same reason. I also turned off Spectre mitigation on my workstation.
I think some people do not like UBo because by default it is a little light on blocking so most websites just work. Well, you can configure it to block more things, and if you use uMatrix you already are willing to deal with the pain of this process.
[1] https://zerodium.com/program.html
[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-this-spectre-proof-of-c...