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posted by takyon on Friday June 15 2018, @02:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-where-that-came-from dept.

The Intel® FPU speculation vulnerability has been confirmed. Theo guessed right last week.

Using information disclosed in Theo's talk, Colin Percival developed a proof-of-concept exploit in around 5 hours. This seems to have prompted an early end to an embargo (in which OpenBSD was not involved), and the official announcement of the vulnerability.

Also at The Register, Hot Hardware, and BetaNews.

An update to the article appearing in The Register adds:

A security flaw within Intel Core and Xeon processors can be potentially exploited to swipe sensitive data from the chips' math processing units.

Malware or malicious logged-in users can attempt to leverage this design blunder to steal the inputs and results of computations performed in private by other software.

These numbers, held in FPU registers, could potentially be used to discern parts of cryptographic keys being used to secure data in the system. For example, Intel's AES encryption and decryption instructions use FPU registers to hold keys.

In short, the security hole could be used to extract or guess at secret encryption keys within other programs, in certain circumstances, according to people familiar with the engineering mishap.

Modern versions of Linux – from kernel version 4.9, released in 2016, and later – and modern Windows, including Server 2016, as well as the latest spins of OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD are not affected by this flaw (CVE-2018-3665).

Windows Server 2008 is among the operating systems that will need to be patched, we understand, and fixes for affected Microsoft and non-Microsoft kernels are on their way. The Linux kernel team is back-porting mitigations to pre-4.9 kernels.

Essentially, hold tight, and wait for patches to land for your Intel-powered machines, if they are vulnerable. CVE-2018-3665 isn't the end of the world: malicious software has to be already running on your system to attempt to exploit it, and even then, it can only lift out crumbs at a time.

[...] Red Hat has more technical details, here. RHEL 5, 6, and 7, and Enterprise MRG 2 not running kernel-alt are vulnerable. In a statement to The Register, the Linux vendor clarified that this a potential task-to-task theft of information:


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @05:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 15 2018, @05:32AM (#693344)

    Uh, no. Watch the talk. The working assumption that they started with, which allowed someone to write an exploit in less than one workday, is that the hardware is not bothering with permission checks until the decision about which tree to collapse is made.