Researchers Claim to Find New Solution to Spectre, Meltdown
The researchers call their solution Dynamically Allocated Way Guard (DAWG) and revealed it in a recent paper. This name stands in opposition to Intel's Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) and is said to prevent attackers from accessing ostensibly secure information through exploiting flaws in the speculative execution process. Best of all, DAWG is said to require very few resources that CAT isn't already using and can be enabled with operating system changes instead of requiring the in-silicon fixes many thought were needed to address the flaws.
[...] Here's how the researchers summarized their approach with DAWG:
"Unlike existing mechanisms such as CAT, DAWG disallows hits across protection domains. This affects hit paths and cache coherence, and DAWG handles these issues with minimal modification to modern operating systems, while reducing the attack surface of operating systems to a small set of annotated sections where data moves across protection domains, or where domains are resized/reallocated. Only in these handful of routines, DAWG protection is relaxed, and other defensive mechanisms such as speculation fences are applied as needed."
Also at TechCrunch and Engadget.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 20 2018, @07:10AM
That proposal is only for "hits across protection domains", which means it only fixes those issues AMD was never affected by and that Intel already has fixes for on their newest silicon.
It does absolutely nothing for all the other, far more tricky issues.
And for the people commenting on games: I am pretty sure CAT only exists on Xeons, so it's of no use for ordinary desktop users.
So overall I am not sure it is useful enough that anyone will actually bother to implement it...