Factory Pitfall Norman Hardy (norm@netcom.com)
Wed, 23 Dec 1998 15:07:24 -0800

There is an avoidable pitfall in Factory usage. The requester passes in a spacebank and if that space bank buys and sells material from a general pool (which is the current normal practice) than an unconfined accomplice can obsereve the waxing and wayning of storage and thus receive signals from code within the confined environment. Banks can be configured to limit this effect to zero or near zero at fairly small storage cost.

This "covert channel" was found by preliminary formal security analysis.

Norman Hardy <http://www.mediacity.com/~norm>