[Dailydave] Towards Heat Death

[David Aitel]

So much of internet security is pointing out to overly optimistic people
that they are trying to fight from their back, against a hungry T-Rex
who doesn't care about your brazilian jiu jitsu black belt, and has no
arms to armbar anyways.

Like, one of my favorite papers Immunity ever did was the Cloudburst [1]
paper, wherein various member of the DoD wanted to put SECRET and
UNCLASSIFIED networks on the same computer, separated by a hypervisor.
What we said was "in this one instance you can break the hypervisor and
obtain full control from a guest" but what we meant was "Doing things in
this insane way makes the T-Rex hungrier."

Likewise, while side channel attacks are the least sexy of all attacks
in demos on the conference stage, but I feel like processors have been
up against the physics wall for a decade, and when I hang out with
processor people all we hear about is heat management processors because
no processor can run as fast as its spec says it can with more than one
core at a time, and even then, not for very long. I feel like James
Mickens has a whole paper on this stuff that no one read or took
seriously? [2]

Anyways, these are exciting times, and it's because new bug classes are
being detected as fast as new bugs used to be and the T-Rexs are
hungrier than ever.

-dave

[1]
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/KORTCHINSKY/BHUSA09-Kortchinsky-Cloudburst-PAPER.pdf

[2] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/theslowwinter.pdf

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