Re: Byte Addressability And Beyond

Stephen Fuld wrote:

Terje Mathisen wrote:

 Usually, when a CPU needs to work on something, it will need to get
the data into $L1 anyway? It is only when the work is simply to be a
pipeline that having a way to bypass the CPU completely really makes
a difference, right?

Right.  But my point is that the CPU never really need to "work" on the
encrypted data.  It it frequently only sent to, or received from the
network or a storage device, hence the pipelined approach has
advantages.

If the keys are visible in application memory, Spectré like attacks can
read out those keys. If the keys are visible in supervisor memory,
similar
attack strategies can read them out. Thus, it makes sense that the CPUs
not be doing the cryption.
{{Or they could fix the µArchitecture so Spectré like attacks are
prevented
but apparently they have no cause for that.}}