Spectre on Javascript?

The chaos caused by Spectre and Meltdown seems to have quieten down. Not because the danger period is over, but well, there are other news to report. As far as I know the long tail of the fix is still on-going, and nothing short of hardware revision can really fix them without the obligatory reduction in performance.

Anyway.

One of the those who quickly released a fix, was web browser vendors. And the fix was to "reduce granularity of performance timers" (in Javascript), because with high-precision timers, it is possible to do Spectre-like timing attack.

This, I don't understand. How could one perform Spectre or even Spectre-like timing attack using Javascript? Doesn't a Javascript program run in a VM? How would it be able to access its host memory by linear address, let alone by physical address? I have checked wasm too - while it does have pointers, a wasm program is basically an isolated program that lives in its own virtual memory space, no?

In other words - the fix is probably harmless, but could one actually perform Spectre or Spectre-like attack using browser-based Javascript in the first place?

That is still a great mystery to me. May be one day I will be enlightened.

Posted on 21 Feb 2018, 23:52 - Categories: Linux General
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