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  • Félixfay59@tech.lgbt
    Oct 7, 2026, 7:44 PM

    @jripley @joe sounds like a necessary step at any rate; what hopes do you have to fix the problem if you don’t have that?

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  • Joe Groffjoe@f.duriansoftware.com
    Oct 7, 2026, 7:57 PM

    @fay59 @jripley this seems like a situation where mitigation is still worthwhile to some degree even without a 100% airtight solution, since some of these leakages require higher sophistication and/or a longer exploit chain to get to than if the secret is left sitting

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  • John Ripleyjripley@mastodon.social
    Oct 7, 2026, 8:13 PM

    @joe @fay59 It is an unpopular opinion, but mine is these mitigations should _not_ be used. Not even if there is "compiler support". Keeping secrets from other parts of the same task, in the same program, is extremely fragile. People integrate these repos into platforms you didn't expect—with the expectation they get sanitizing—and it fails to do so. And worse, they go no further than this, because the expectation is data is gone, which it isn't, because it's a *systems* problem.

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  • John Ripleyjripley@mastodon.social
    Oct 7, 2026, 8:27 PM

    @joe @fay59 If you have a feature-rich platform (SoC) then perhaps you can use ISA or mapped-device features, so general-purpose parts of your core are never tainted. Otherwise, the only way to guarantee isolation of that function is context isolation, and the least leaky method is a separate task/process. Or if you're feature-rich, a dedicated "secure" core, or (worse but works better than nothing) a "secure state".

    Otherwise, some day you find your sanitizing silently stopped working.

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  • Félixfay59@tech.lgbt
    Oct 7, 2026, 9:26 PM

    @jripley @joe I still don’t understand how a holistic solution to this problem can exist without the language/compiler change that you don’t like

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  • John Ripleyjripley@mastodon.social
    Oct 7, 2026, 9:43 PM

    @fay59 @joe Consider how you would test that your program was not leaking secrets. [Or even how you would test this feature worked, for your function]

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  • Félixfay59@tech.lgbt
    Oct 8, 2026, 1:06 AM

    @jripley @joe I am considering that and I am still not arriving at “this is unnecessary”. There’s plenty of very common, essentially portable ways to read bytes that are just hanging out in memory, even if they’re not the only way

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