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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:02PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:02PM (#616740)

    Do we have a snazzy name and logo yet for this issue?

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  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02 2018, @04:19PM (#616750)

    The only issue we know about is a side channel attack based on page table faults, it's pure speculation about Intel's speculative execution. Thomas Gleixner has already proposed an excellent snazzy name "Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines" [lkml.org] and the logo could be something like this? [wikimedia.org]

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 03 2018, @06:19AM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Wednesday January 03 2018, @06:19AM (#617076) Journal

    Name: SellIntelStock
    Logo: AMD logo

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