Live data from Hacker News

When machine learning tells the wrong story

jackcook.com

1–10 of 32 posts

Re: When machine learning tells the wrong story

#8
Very interesting and well-explained. Given that the research has been out for two years, any interested data collectors have considered this! Forget hackers, this an exploit for enterprises and governments!

Could websites concerned with privacy deploy a package that triggers interrupts randomly? Could a browser extension do it for every site?

Re: When machine learning tells the wrong story

#9
post #2

I wonder if adopting io_uring on Linux might allow a browser to preserve the privacy a little, in this specific case. (Though it is very hard to get right, unfortunately.)

My suspicion is that io_uring itself mitigates syscall overhead but doesn't do anything to change interrupts.

You could probably do things at the OS level to change interrupt behavior in a way that would mitigate this attack significantly, I'll need to read the paper to see if they discuss this.

Re: When machine learning tells the wrong story

#10
post #9
post #2

I wonder if adopting io_uring on Linux might allow a browser to preserve the privacy a little, in this specific case. (Though it is very hard to get right, unfortunately.)

My suspicion is that io_uring itself mitigates syscall overhead but doesn't do anything to change interrupts. You could probably do things at the OS level to change interrupt behavior in a way that would mitigate this attack significantly, I'll need to read the paper to see if they discuss this.

Correct. Probably the only way to mitigate interrupt stuff today is what they mentioned - you inject noise into the system intentionally with their example being to make network requests to local addresses. Fundamentally though the challenge is that if you start doing that, you probably start degrading performance fairly quickly for your neighbors. It’s really hard to balance mitigations that retain good performance. A more comprehensive solution probably involves a redesign of how we build CPUs and operating systems rather than trying to keep fighting this in software.
Post reply on HN