It's not that it makes the practice of breaking into computers that much more interesting so much as it makes the underlying field much more interesting to work in. The engineering problems just got a lot more complex. We're all taking an attack vector seriously --- microarchitectural side channels --- that we weren't taking as seriously before, except as an abstract threat to crypto and a way of defeating a mitigation --- KASLR --- that nobody believed in anyways.
What's glorious is that serious software security people now have to start being literate about what it means to reverse engineer and dump the branch history buffers on different CPUs. Getting dragged through this kind of minutiae is the reason I'm still in this field after 22 years.
And I'm just a bystander here. Imagine what it must have been like for Jann Horn over the last several months!
This subsection describes how we reverse-engineered the internals of the Haswell branch predictor. Some of this is written down from memory, since we didn't keep a detailed record of what we were doing.
... because shit was so crazy while they were working this out that they didn't have the cycles to write everything down!
I'd be surprised if other Googlers like Christian Ludloff (also of sandpile.org fame) and Dean G were not involved. They know x86 better than many engineers at Intel/AMD, having been in charge of the most performance/cost critical code (e.g. tuning search serving down to the last cycle), as well as qualifying new platforms and identifying a steady stream of CPU bugs.
As someone specializing on a different field, this comment reads to me as if you were an astronomer being excited about discovering a gigantic meteor heading towards the Earth :)
Some of us would be terrified, but also excited about the prospect of studying a supermassive black hole from the inside. You know what I mean? Some things are just so singular and incredible, and so to the heart of a given field of interest, that “glorious” is a perfect word to describe it. An alien invasion of Earth would be a nightmare, but for some it would be the moment they could finally move past the realm of the hypothetical.
To the extent that he exploits computers for a living (e.g. pentesting) and not stops exploits for a living, it seems more like a (presumably law-abiding) arsonist calling houses burning glorious.
