MIT Researchers Propose DAWG Defense against Spectre and Meltdown
Security researchers from MIT claim to have devised a hardware solution to prevent cache timing attacks based on speculative execution, such as Spectre and Meltdown. Their approach, named Dynamically Allocated Way Guard (DAWG), splits the processor cache in variably-sized partitions to make it impossible for processes to snoop on other processes’ cache partitions.
GitHub Octoverse 2018 Highlights
Octoverse is the annual survey that GitHub conducts among its developers to take the pulse of the community. Here the most significant highlights from this year’s edition.
GitHub Incident Analysis Shows How to Improve Service Reliability
On October 21, 2018, GitHub users experienced a degraded service during 24 hours due to an incident caused by routine maintenance work. This led to the display of outdated and inconsistent information and to the unavailability of webhooks and other internal services for 24 hours. GitHub post-incident report shows where things failed and suggests how to improve site reliability.
PortSmash is the Latest Side-Channel Attack Affecting Intel CPUs
Researchers have devised a new kind of timing attack to steal information from a different process running on the same core with SMT/hyper-threading enabled. By carefully measuring port contention delays when sending instructions to a shared core, the researchers could recover a private key from a different process. Intel CPUs are probably not the only ones affected.