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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Do you think it is safe and secure to disable Mitigation in Fedora for the sake of performance? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've seen a video from CTT demonstrating the <10 performance boosts by simply off the mitigation. The system will be secure for personal use as before.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The system will be secure for personal use as before.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. CPU side channels allow data to be leaked across security contexts. For example, from a user process to sandboxed JavaScript in a browser, from kernel space to user space, or from one containerized process to another. This is a problem even on a single user system without any VMs.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

Many years ago when I was still doing my undergrad I had a cyber security prof talk about side channels:

”There's no way to prevent side-channels. As long as two components are sharing the same physical resource there will be side channels. The only problem is that these side channels are leaking way more bits than we expected.”

So the question here is how big does the side channel need to be to leak something sensitive from memory? Turning off mitigations will almost certainly lead to larger side channels. Whether that is worth the risk is up to you.