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Intel x86 considered harmful – survey of attacks against x86 over last 10 years

(blog.invisiblethings.org)
276 points chei0aiV | 3 comments | 27 Oct 15 14:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.677s | source
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kragen ◴[27 Oct 15 15:35 UTC] No.10458647[source]▶
Probably worth pointing out that the author is the project lead of Qubes, one of the very few promising projects in the vast wasteland of computer security.
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kachnuv_ocasek ◴[27 Oct 15 17:32 UTC] No.10459645[source]▶
Very few? Seriously?
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Pfiffer ◴[27 Oct 15 17:45 UTC] No.10459760[source]▶
Yeah man the only good things in CS are Postgres and common lisp. Everything else is a waste of time.
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nickpsecurity ◴[27 Oct 15 20:58 UTC] No.10461082[source]▶
Try crash-safe.org or Cambrige's CHERI for hardware; Qflow w/ YoSys for OSS synthesis; Microsoft's VerveOS for OS correctness; Racket for LISP; Google's F1 RDBMS for databases; Ur/Web for web apps; Cornell's JIF/SIF/SWIFT/Fabric for distributed apps; Coqasm for assembler; CompCert and CakeML for compilers/tooling.

That's just a tiny selection from my collection. Lots of exciting things going on for secure and correct tools that are still powerful. Postgres and Common LISP are both weak and boring in comparison despite being good tools. :P

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1. smt88 ◴[28 Oct 15 02:52 UTC] No.10462621[source]▶
I don't know if I understand how most of these things could be considered secure unless they've been heavily attacked already.

Are they all so much more secure by design that you consider them to be great projects?

My experience is heavily with server-side web languages, so I'm particularly skeptical of those. Even the most secure-seeming web languages have buggy, insecure implementations at first.

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2. kragen ◴[28 Oct 15 03:02 UTC] No.10462645[source]▶
Those projects are mostly research into how to make software and hardware less buggy; most of them are not themselves written with a threat model in mind.
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3. nickpsecurity ◴[28 Oct 15 13:01 UTC] No.10464141[source]▶
Exactly. Most could be, though, if people put forth the effort. So I keep mentioning such work.

Note: This comment is mainly for others reading along. Something I do on forums. I know you already understand this point.