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Things are definitely getting lost in the panic here. It's going to take several weeks for everyone to get their head on straight, but yes, PTI is only going to be justified in certain situations, and if you don't allow untrusted code to run on your system (most servers), you will probably be fine with just your host CPU patched because no one will get the chance to run the exploit.

Of course, if an attacker uses a remote execution vulnerability to get into the box with user-constrained permissions, this can be used to read guest memory without concern for user limitation, so in that way it's a long-term pernicious threat that will make local exploitation significantly easier, and security-conscious organizations will still opt to use it despite the fact that they don't run untrusted code. Also, since this would allow them to read all memory in the guest, if you have sensitive stuff like database credentials coming into memory, they could be sniffed without requiring further exploitation.

Also, consider that at present, PTI is disabled by default for AMD chips, based on AMD's assurances that Meltdown does not affect them. If you're running in the cloud and your host is AMD-based, you don't need PTI in either the guest or the host.



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