The Anthropic Side Channel (was: How would shallow generators compose with lambda?)

[Mark S. Miller]

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.com> wrote:
>> I am assuming that a hard stop destroying an event loop also destroys
>> (at least makes inaccessible) all objects that were able to execute
>> within that event loop.
>
> You're right that this is necessary with threads and fail-stop information
> flow systems, but plain old iloop DOS prevention as practiced in browsers
> does *not* reload the page. And the browser APIs are full of  ways to detect
> that finallys didn't run, through effects overt and covert.
> [...]
> Just consider iloop DOS prevention as practiced in browsers today: finally
> may not run. That's enough.

JavaScript is used in many hosting environments besides browsers. In
particular, there is rapidly rising enthusiasm for server-side use of
JavaScript, where integrity may matter more, and the equivalent of
reloading may be perfectly fine after a preemptive termination. The
language spec should avoid making such higher integrity uses harder.

I'm curious: What ways do you have in mind to detect that finallys didn't run?


>> So, the anthropic side channel enables B to communicate what Brendan
>> might call a half a bit of information to C.
>
> You must be referring to my slides at
> http://www.dagstuhl.de/Materials/index.en.phtml?09141 -- I should have
> better slides blogged next week.

I was indeed. I look forward to your new slides.


-- 
    Cheers,
    --MarkM