Re: Hyper-Threading Vulnerability

Andi Kleen
2005-05-15T09:54:49Z

On Fri, May 13, 2005 at 09:16:09PM +0200, Diego Calleja wrote:
> El Fri, 13 May 2005 20:03:58 +0200,
> Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de> escribi?:
>
>
> > This is not a kernel problem, but a user space problem. The fix
> > is to change the user space crypto code to need the same number of cache line
> > accesses on all keys.
>
>
> However they've patched the FreeBSD kernel to "workaround?" it:
> ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/patches/SA-05:09/htt5.patch

That's a similar stupid idea as they did with the disk write
cache (lowering the MTBFs of their disks by considerable factors,
which is much worse than the power off data loss problem)
Let's not go down this path please.

-Andi