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From: Eric McCorkle <eric@metricspace.net>
Subject: Potential band-aid for Meltdown
Message-ID: <30300a34-d0d9-efbf-c9b3-6375703f65a0@metricspace.net>
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2018 10:27:59 -0500
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I was thinking over meltdown mitigations this morning, and a thought
occurred to me (which falls in line with general ideas I've been pursuing)

This is a Crowd Supply project I've been eyeing:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/rhs-research/nanoevb

It's basically an FPGA that can plug into an M.2 slot.  One potential
use of this could be to use it as an off-die crypto unit, thereby
keeping keys out of memory.  I don't know what the driver situation
looks like for this thing, but as its an open hardware project, I doubt
it would be too hard to get support up and running.

I realize it's not a perfect solution by far, but it would provide some
level of mitigation (especially for things like GELI) that could hold
people over until they can replace their hardware.