is it just me or did SPECTRE manifest @halvarflake's "weird machine" concept in real hardware? i hope someone's already working on a paper about the computational power of this machine.
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Replying to @paxteam @halvarflake
hmm. does that qualify as a weird state? you could argue that, in the paper's terminology, it all happens in transitory states between sane states, and the CPU never actually moves into a weird state. (IOW: the CPU still behaves according to architectural spec.)
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yeah, it is a bit more complicated in this case. the weird state is already entered when the CPU fails to do what the implementor thought/intended it would do; the ifsm for OS would not include kernel/user or user/user side channels?
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Replying to @halvarflake @paxteam
but the CPU will always be doing some stuff the implementor didn't specify, which is the whole reason you introduced transitory states. which part of an attack crosses the line from transitory to weird for you? the timing measurement that turns uarch state into arch state?
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and if so, this still wouldn't really be "programming the weird machine", but "programming the transitory machine" or so
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only reading the output would be weird
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