The information security world is focused on two new security vulnerabilities, “Spectre” and “Meltdown”, that represent vulnerabilities embedded in computer hardware. Lawfare readers should respond in two ways: keep their operating systems up to date and, critically, install an ad-blocker for your web browser. (Here are guides on how to do so in Chrome and Firefox.) In fact, a proper response to Spectre should involve ad-blocking on all government computers. Other than that, don’t worry.
Readers who just wanted to know what to do can stop reading. But for those curious about some of the technical background on these vulnerabilities and why ad-blocking is an essential security measure for a modern computer, read on.
Modern Computers: Caches, Parallelism, and Isolation
Modern computers are incredibly complicated but almost all the performance comes from attempting to exploit two concepts: caches and parallelism. And modern computer security often rests on a principle of isolation, blocking the ability of one program to learn or affect what else is happening on the computer. Spectre and Meltdown exploit breaches of isolation due to the interaction of caches and some parallelism features.
A cache is just something holding the previous result, under the assumption that “what you do in the future is often the same as what you do in the past.” So you have instruction caches that hold previously executed instructions, since a program is likely to execute the same instruction again, and data caches that hold previously accessed memory. But there are also more obscure caches, such as the “Branch Target Buffer” (BTB), which records where previous instructions jumped to in an attempt to predict that branch in the future, or the “Translation Lookaside Buffer” (TLB), which remembers mappings between virtual addresses and the actual locations in the computer’s main memory. If a relevant result is in the cache, an operation happens quickly, otherwise that operation is slow.
Parallelism just means doing multiple things at the same time. This can be at a low level, such as observing that in the following miniature program, “X = A + B; Y = C * D,” it is possible to compute X and Y at the same time. Or it can be at the scale of a Google data center where tens of thousands of computers are all working on different parts of the problem.
One particular method for increasing performance is speculative and out of order execution. So if the computer sees a program like “if (X) then (Y = A + B)”, even if it hasn’t discovered what X is, it can still try to compute Y = A + B. But the computer will only actually write the value Y if it discovers X is true and will only attempt to compute Y if it thinks the branch will be taken based on the branch predictor and its BTB. Of course how long this process takes depends on the state of all the caches as well as the final result of determining the value of X.
While processor designers attempt to squeeze every last bit of performance out of a combination of caches and parallelism, security engineers rely on isolation. If two programs are running on a computer, it is critical that one program is not able to deduce information about the other. There are several important barriers to that effect.
Meltdown, which exploits a weakness in Intel’s TLB to allow a normal program to read the operating system’s private memory, is easy to exploit, but there are already robust patches available. Unfortunately, these patches substantially degrade performance as they require clearing the TLB whenever the operating system returns. Since the TLB is a particularly critical cache, losing the cache state can be particularly hard on performance. Some computer workloads, such as those that rely on a lot of operating system calls, may see a worst-case 20% reduction in performance.
Modern Web Advertisement: Auction and Syndication
So although both vulnerabilities are fascinating and yet another great show of the security industry dancing madly on the lip of a volcano, most Lawfare readers only need to know two things: keep your systems patched and install an ad-blocker. And there is one policy prescription: deploy government-wide ad-blocking.