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Major Hardware Bug Quietly Being Patched in the Open

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @02:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the starting-off-the-new-year-right dept.

LoRdTAW writes:

Spotted over on HN:

The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation patches (archive)

tl;dr: there is presently an embargoed security bug impacting apparently all contemporary CPU architectures that implement virtual memory, requiring hardware changes to fully resolve. Urgent development of a software mitigation is being done in the open and recently landed in the Linux kernel, and a similar mitigation began appearing in NT kernels in November. In the worst case the software fix causes huge slowdowns in typical workloads. There are hints the attack impacts common virtualization environments including Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine, and additional hints the exact attack may involve a new variant of Rowhammer.

Turns out 2018 might be more interesting than first thought. So grab some popcorn and keep those systems patched!

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:42AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @08:42AM (#616663)

    hardware mitigation for rowhammer.

    Ineffective [arxiv.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:52PM (#616764)

    Sigh, didn't read the paper. They didn't try TRR (which is citation 33). They instead dismissed it on page 4 with:

    Hence, all elimination-based defenses are either not practical or require hardware changes, making them not applicable for commodity systems. Commodity systems should instead be protected using detection- or neutralization-based approaches.

    And the other citation [60] tested a device with TRR and MAC disabled for performance reasons, as it is an optional extension to LPDDR4.