RE: Meltdown and spectre

Cheers  

Tim...  

On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 5:06 PM, Reen, Elizabeth <dmarc-noreply_at_freelists.org> wrote:

            Since all of my servers are in house behind numerous firewalls, do I need to patch everything? The performance hit is going to hurt. Do I need to do that for dev and testing servers which run with redacted data? I could need to double the amount of servers I own. Yes they are cheap, but it adds up after a while. What about licenses? Will I need to up them because I need more iron to do the same work?  

            I agree that you can’t stop a fully prived account from reading memory under this scenario. It is a bad operating system that lets this happen. Given the say Linux was developed, it is easy for something like this to sneak through. Linux is a great o/s, but you get what you pay for here. The reason it is so popular is that it is so inexpensive. This is not an issue in AIX, Sparc, or HP/UX. They cost money because they have been designed and tested. They did not start out life as an alternative to windows.  

            Wrapper on every syscall is probably the fastest fix. It is far from the best fix. Hopefully they will put in the correct fix.  

Liz  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Mark W. Farnham Sent: Friday, January 05, 2018 8:38 AM
To: niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com; andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com Cc: 'fmh'; 'ORACLE-L'
Subject: RE: Meltdown and spectre  

This also poses what I think is a relevant question for folks who place their physical RDBMS server(s) securely and only have privileged logons anyway. (You really can’t stop a fully privileged account from viewing memory or any other resources anyway and only in memory encryption can frustrate that if a bad actor has gained a privileged access to a server.)  

So, will there be an “insecure” patch to skip the overhead and rely on server access control?  

Then we can have a fresh round of the debate about whether “physical” or “virtual” is faster with the playing field thus tilted significantly in favor of “physical.”  

I also wonder for “virtual” servers whether this could be merely a “hypervisor” patch (which in ring security theory dating back to the 1970’s could establish a memory address bounded area at the privileged account layer (which should be a heckuva lot cheaper than a wrapper on every “syscall.”)  

DTSS is lookin’ pretty good right now. Still it was our own fault for not explaining clearly to enough to management that 100 million (plus) copies at $39.95 each was more than 12 copies at $10 million each. Sigh.  

mwf