Re: Proposal: CAP_PAYLOAD to reduce Meltdown and Spectre mitigation costs

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Sun, Jan 07, 2018 at 11:16:28AM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
> I think capabilities will work just as well with cgroups. The container
> manager will set CAP_PAYLOAD to payload containers; and if those run an init
> system or a container manager themselves, they'll drop CAP_PAYLOAD for all
> process/sub-containers but their payloads.

The reason why cgroups are better is Spectre can be used to steal
information from within the same privilege level --- e.g., you could
use Javascript to steal a user's Coindesk credentials or Lastpass
data, which is going to be *way* more lucrative than trying to mine
cryptocurrency in the sly in a user's browser.  :-)

As a result, you probably want Spectre mitigations to be enabled in a
root process --- which means capabilities aren't the right answer.

Regards,

						- Ted