It also depends on your security model
It also depends on your security model
Posted Mar 1, 2018 12:49 UTC (Thu) by matthias (subscriber, #94967)In reply to: It also depends on your security model by pbonzini
Parent article: Shedding old architectures and compilers in the kernel
You should keep in mind that at least in theory, Spectre can be exploited remotely: Send crafted network packets to train the speculation engine and afterwards extract information based on timing of future packets.
I do not expect this to be a problem right now, as it will be even harder than a local exploit and the bandwidth of the hidden channel will be much lower than for a local attacker. The SNR will be much worse, due to increased noise. But it is not as easy as saying "If $networkprocess is broken, then we have lost anyway". Spectre works even without breaking any process.