Don't you think the first CPU engineer to implement "speculative execution" with roll-backs, was thinking: "I hope this works. But I'm not 100% sure?" The concept of partly undoing executed code sounds so hairy, I can't imagine the designers being 100% confident about it.
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What makes speculative execution tractable is that there is a known "committed" architecture state, and the property that speculative microarchitecture state is guaranteed to commit observably in-order and only once its dependencies are satisfied.
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Indeed, my first response when reading up on how Spectre works was "wow, that's kinda obvious and nobody has [publicly] considered that for 20 years?" - but then, I guess most security issues are "obvious" in retrospect. Hindsight is 20/20.
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Yeah, that’s what reminded me of naive set theory. It seemed sound by the very nature of mathematics, but then some hacker builds the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves...
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hard to believe that the intelligence agencies never discovered this independently, a long time ago.
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indeed
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This was when they started allowing more and more back doors into computer hardware, outsourcing, cutting corners. There's always a price to pay when you take the wrong path.
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It has nothing with intentional backdoors. This is such a simple and complex problem at the same time that it hid in plain sight. You were stepping on it without being aware. As someone said already, it's easy to understand it see it as obvious now after we know about it.
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Humans are just much better at coming up with ways of breaking out from a cell than building one.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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The worst failures are always failures of imagination.
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We don't think these are purposeful backdoors put in place by the NSA?
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