Comment by vlovich123

I’d say yes. Reading the blogs fully (and reading comments from people like Herb) makes it pretty clear it’s seen as a defense in depth mechanism. Yes it’s a debugging tool but since it’s running always at runtime it’s also usable for security purposes.

Whether it should be used for security or not is irrelevant - it clearly will be and I don’t see why it’s inherently undesirable. Seems like a useful technique to further raise the complexity of exploit chains needed to execute an attack and in some applications the speculation bypass may not even matter (eh CHERI + MTE is not subject to this attack based on what’s been written).

The annoying thing is that ARM engineers took your position instead of realizing it will be used for security applications anyway and fixing the speculation issue during the design phase since they did know about this.