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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think the security community is also going to become experts in chip design, these are two full skill sets that are already very difficult to obtain.

We must stop running untrustworthy code on modern full-performance chips.

The feedback loop that powers everything is: faster chips allow better engineering and science, creating faster chips. We’re not inserting the security community into that loop and slowing things down just so people can download random programs onto their computers and run them at random. That’s just a stupid thing to do, there’s no way to make it safe, and there never will be.

I mean we’re talking about prefetching. If there was a way to give ram cache-like latencies why wouldn’t the hardware folks already have done it?

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I almost gave you up an upvote until your third paragraph, but I have to now give a hard disagree. We're running more untrusted code than ever, and we absolutely should trust it less than ever and have hardware and software designed with security in mind. Security should be priority #1 from here on out. We are absolutely awash in performance and memory capacity but keep getting surprised by bad security outcomes because it's been second fiddle for too long.

Software is now critical infrastructure in modern society, akin to the power grid and telephone lines. It's a strategic vulnerability to neglect security, and it must happen at all levels of the software and hardware stack. Meaning, trying to crash an enemy's entire society by bricking all of its computers and send them back to the dark ages in milliseconds. I fundamentally don't understand the mindset of people who want to take that kind of risk for a 10% boost in their games' FPS[1].

Part of that is paying back the debt that decades of cutting corners has yielded us.

In reality, the vast majority of the 1000x increase in performance and memory capacity over the past four decades has come from shrinking transistors and increasing clockspeeds and memory density--the 1 or 5 or 10% gains from turning off bounds checks or prefetching aren't the lion's share. And for the record, turning off bounds checks is monumentally stupid, and people should be jailed for it.

[1] I'm exaggerating to make a point here. What we trade for a little desktop or server performance is an enormous, pervasive risk. Not just melting down in a cyberwar, but the constant barrage of intrusion and leaks that costs the economy billions upon billions of dollars per year. We're paying for security, just at the wrong end.

> I fundamentally don't understand the mindset of people who want to take that kind of risk for a 10% boost in their games' FPS[1]

Me either. But, lots of engineers are out there just writing single threaded matlab and python codes with lots of data-dependencies and just hoping the system manages to do a good job (for those operations that can’t be offloaded to BLAS). So I'm glad gamer dollars subsidize the development of fast single threaded chips that handle branchy codes well.

> In reality, the vast majority of the 1000x increase in performance and memory capacity over the past four decades has come from shrinking transistors and increasing clockspeeds and memory density

I disagree, modern designs include deep pipelines, lots of speculation, and complex caches because that’s the only way to spend that higher transistor budget for higher clocks and compensate for the fact that memory latencies haven’t kept up.

> Part of that is paying back the debt that decades of cutting corners has yielded us.

It will be tough, but yeah, server and mainframe users need to roll back the decision to repurpose consumer focus chips like the x86 and arm families. RISC-V is looking good though and seems open enough that maybe they can pick-and-choose which features they take.

> I almost gave you up an upvote until your third paragraph, but I have to now give a hard disagree.

I’m not too worried about votes on this post; this site has lots of web devs and cloud users, pointing out that the ecosystem they rely on is impossible to secure is destined to get lots of downvotes-to-disagree.

How is RISC-V going to solve anything here?

It isn’t a sure thing. Just, since it is a more open ecosystem, maybe the designers of chips that need to be able to safely run untrusted code can still borrow some features from the general population.

I think it is basically impossible to run untrusted code safely or to build sand-proof sandboxes, but I thought the rest of my post was too pessimistic.

It is significantly less complex yet without compromising anything. This means a larger portion of a chip's design effort can be put elsewhere such as into preventing side channel attacks.

I don't really see how the design of RISC-V avoids the need to have a DMP

>I don't really see how the design of RISC-V avoids the need to have a DMP

Because it does not. I also do not see where, if at all, such claim was made.

Perhaps you should explain how this design effort spent preventing side-channel attacks is spent, then?

Anything specific?

Turning off bounds checks is like a 5% performance penalty. Turning off prefetching is like using a computer from twenty years ago.

Turning off prefetching while running crypto code would be a performance gain before you can implement the algorithms safely without even more expensive and fragile software mitigations. Just give me the option of configuring parts of the caches (at least data + instructions + TLBs) as scratchpad and and a "run without timing side-channels pretty please" bit with a clearly defined API contract and accessible (by default) to unprivileged userspace code. Lots of cryptographic algorithms have such small working sets that they would profit from a constant-time accessible scratchpad in the L1d cache if they get to use data dependent addresses into it again.

Happily there are mechanisms to do just that, specifically for the purpose of implementing cryptography (I commented at the top level and don't want to just spamming the url).

I agree that hardware/software codesign are critical to solving things like this, but features like prefetching, speculation, and prediction are absolutely critical to modern pipelines and broadly speaking are what enable what we think of as "modern computer performance." This has been true for over 20 years now. In terms of "overhead" it's not in the same ballpark -- or even the same sport, frankly -- as something like bounds checking or even garbage collection. Hell, if the difference was within even one order magnitude, they'd have done it already.

> download random programs onto their computers and run them at random

To be clear that includes what we're all doing by downloading and running Javascript to read HN.

Maybe I can say "don't run adversarial code on my same CPU" and only care about over-the-network CPU side-channels (of which there are still some), because I write Go crypto, but it doesn't sound like something my colleagues writing browser code can do.

Unfortunately somebody has tricked users to leaving JavaScript on for every site, it is a really bad situation.

Security and utility are in opposing balances often. The safest possible computer is one buried far underground without any cables in a faraday cage. Not very useful.

> We’re not inserting the security community into that loop and slowing things down just so people can download random programs onto their computers and run them at random. That’s just a stupid thing to do, there’s no way to make it safe, and there never will be.

Setting aside JavaScript, you can see this today with cloud computers which have largely displaced private clouds. These run untrusted code on shared computers. Fundamentally that’s what they’re doing because that’s what you need for economies of scale, durability, availability, etc. So figuring out a way to run untrusted code on another machine safely is fundamentally a desirable goal. That’s why people are trying to do homomorphic encryption - so that the “safely” part can go both ways and both the HW owner and the “untrusted” SW don’t need to trust each other to execute said code.

Is this exploitable through JavaScript?

In general from what I've seen, most of these JS-based CPU exploits didn't strike me as all that practical in real world conditions. I mean, it is a problem, but not really all that worrying.

> Is this exploitable through JavaScript?

Why wouldn't it be?

How is JavaScript going to run a chosen-input attack against one of your cores for an hour?

If you leave a tab open that's running that JS..

Because JS/html provides APIs to perform cryptography(I can't recall whether the cryptography specs are part of ES or HTML/DOM) - if you try to implement constant time cryptography in JS you will run into a world of hurt due to the entire concept of "fast JS" being dependent on heavy speculation, and lots of exciting variations in timing of even "primitive" operations.

No, the attack would be implemented in JS, not the victim code (though, that too, but that's not what's interesting here).

Ah, you’re concerned about person using js to execute the side channel portion of the attack, not the bit creating the side channel :)

FYI malicious JS executing in victim users' browsers is a huge concern. All sorts of vulnerabilities can be exploited via JS in this way -- every local side-channel like Spectre/Meltdown, worse things like Row Hammer, etc.

Speak for yourself; I've got JavaScript disabled on news.ycombinator.com and it works just fine.

> The feedback loop that powers everything is: faster chips allow better engineering and science, creating faster chips. We’re not inserting the security community into that loop and slowing things down just so people can download random programs onto their computers and run them at random. That’s just a stupid thing to do, there’s no way to make it safe, and there never will be.

Note that in the vast majority of cases, crypto-related code isn't what we spend compute cycles on. If there was a straightforward, cross-architecture mechanism to say, "run this code on a single physical core with no branch prediction, no shared caches, and using in-order execution" then the real-world performance impact would be minimal, but the security benefits would be huge.

I’m in favor of adding some horrible in-order, no speculation, no prefetching, 5 stage pipeline architectures 101 core which can be completely verified and bulletproof to chips.

But the presence of this bulletproof core would not solve the problem of running bad code on modern hardware, unless all untrusted code is run on it.

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