Re: Avoid speculative indirect calls in kernel

[Willy Tarreau]

On Sun, Jan 07, 2018 at 03:14:10PM +0100, Borislav Petkov wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 05, 2018 at 08:13:33AM +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > I'm not fond of running the mitigations, but given that a few sysops can
> > connect to the machine to collect stats or counters, I think it would be
> > better to ensure these people can't happily play with the exploits to
> > dump stuff they shouldn't have access to.
> 
> So if someone exploits the "trusted" process, and then dumps all memory,
> you have practically lost.

Exactly, but there's much more to gain by owning this process anyway in
certain cases than just dumping a few hundreds of kernel bytes.

That's where I consider that "trusted" is more "critical" than "safe" :
if it dies, we all die anyway. Just like you have to trust your plane's
pilot eventhough you don't know him personally.

Willy