https://twitter.com/fugueish/status/1001605230583136256
In light of Spectre/Meltdown, we needed to re-think our threat model and defenses for Chrome renderer processes. Spectre is a new class of hardware side-channel attack that affects (among many other targets) web browsers. This document describes the impact of these side-channel attacks and our approach to mitigating them. The upshot of the latest developments is that the folks working on this from the V8 side are increasingly convinced that there is no viable alternative to Site Isolation as a systematic mitigation to SSCAs [speculative side-channel attacks]. In this new mental model, we have to assume that user code can reliably gain access to all data within a renderer process through speculation. This means that we definitely need some sort of ‘privileged/PII data isolation’ guarantees as well, for example ensuring that password and credit card info are not speculatively loaded into a renderer process without user consent. […] In fact, any software that both (a) runs (native or interpreted) code from more than one source; and (b) attempts to create a security boundary inside a single address space, is potentially affected. For example, software that processes document formats with scripting capabilities, and which loads multiple documents from different sources into the same process, may need to take defense measures similar to those described here.[…]
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/security/side-channel-threat-model.md