Saint Foreshadow, Who Read the Enclaves' Future

Patron of SGX enclaves, the L1 cache, and hypervisors that share too much with the neighbours.

Life

On 14 August 2018 two groups of researchers, spanning KU Leuven, Technion, the University of Michigan and the University of Adelaide, revealed a new speculative execution attack on Intel processors. By exploiting a flaw called L1 Terminal Fault, they could read data from SGX enclaves, including their attestation keys. The later variants, called Foreshadow-NG, also hit operating systems and virtual machines.

Prayer

O Saint Foreshadow, who foresees secrets before they are asked for, let our L1 cache be flushed every time we change rooms. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating microcode, operating system and hypervisor and, where needed, disabling hyper-threading with a sigh.

Speculate on the future and you read other people's present.