MIT's DAWG Mitigates Spectre and Meltdown

Researchers at MIT have built a new security measure on top of Intel's Cache Allocation Technology. Dynamically Allocated Way Guard, or DAWG, is built to isolate programs from each other without the performance overhead of Intel's CAT. The technology only requires "minor modifications to the underlying operating system to implement," but unfortunately, it won't protect against all known attacks. The developers say it will mitigate most of them with more development, and hope to see integration of similar systems into future software. The full research paper can be downloaded in the original article.

'We think this is an important step forward in giving computer architects, cloud providers and other IT professionals a better way to efficiently and dynamically allocate resources,' claims lead author Vladimir Kiriansky. 'It establishes clear boundaries for where sharing should and should not happen, so that programs with sensitive information can keep that data reasonably secure.'

Good to see other techniques being developed, although it sounds like this is a far ways off of being implemented at the consumer level.

Right direction! Don't feel like having my PC feel like a 486SX again.

Given the growing number of cores on a chip, maybe we should ditch the current one core runs many processes model and move toward a each core has one process model. If the many cores each have a small cache all to themselves, they wouldn't have to share anything with any other core except input data and output results.

Dead Parrot said:

Given the growing number of cores on a chip, maybe we should ditch the current one core runs many processes model and move toward a each core has one process model. If the many cores each have a small cache all to themselves, they wouldn't have to share anything with any other core except input data and output results.

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Hmm let's see, open up task manager. 8 Apps, 81 background processes. I think we're still a ways off until 128 core or greater cpus become mainstream.

So ... MIT let the DAWGs out?

arnemetis said:

Hmm let's see, open up task manager. 8 Apps, 81 background processes. I think we're still a ways off until 128 core or greater cpus become mainstream.

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The hardware isn't really ready today but with some of the newer Ryzens sporting 32 cores, we really aren't that far away either. Close enough that getting the software switched over would probably take longer then it will for the chip makers to reach 128+ cores on a single chip die.

Dead Parrot said:

The hardware isn't really ready today but with some of the newer Ryzens sporting 32 cores, we really aren't that far away either. Close enough that getting the software switched over would probably take longer then it will for the chip makers to reach 128+ cores on a single chip die.

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The real problem is we need to reach a saturation point where potato pcs have enough cores to run all the processes without a problem, not just high end ones. Otherwise you have a hugely segmented market that would last for years, further slowing software adoption. Also, it's quite possible that this issue is entirely mitigated by new chip designs long before we reach the quantity of cores needed. I just don't see it.

arnemetis said:

Hmm let's see, open up task manager. 8 Apps, 81 background processes. I think we're still a ways off until 128 core or greater cpus become mainstream.

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Yeah, 145 processes, 1800 threads. I really don't see how we can use more than 4 cores /s.