Wednesday, March 11th 2020
Intel Processors Hit with LVI Security Vulnerabilities, Mitigation Hits Performance Hard
A new class of security vulnerabilities affect Intel processors, which can cause them to leak out sensitive information if probed in a certain way, but that's not the worst news for Intel and its users. The software- or firmware-level mitigation for this vulnerability can inflict performance reductions "ranging from 2x to 19x," according to a report by The Register. A full mitigation for the new Load Value Injection (LVI) class of vulnerabilities requires Intel to redesign software compilers. The vulnerability is chronicled under CVE-2020-0551 and Intel-SA-00334. It is not a remote code execution threat, however, it puts multi-tenant machines, such as physical servers handling multiple tenants via virtual servers.
"LVI turns previous data extraction attacks around, like Meltdown, Foreshadow, ZombieLoad, RIDL and Fallout, and defeats all existing mitigations. Instead of directly leaking data from the victim to the attacker, we proceed in the opposite direction: we smuggle — "inject" — the attacker's data through hidden processor buffers into a victim program and hijack transient execution to acquire sensitive information, such as the victim's fingerprints or passwords," the reasearchers write in the abstract of their paper describing the vulnerability. Anti-virus manufacturer BitDefender independently discovered LVI and shared its study with Intel. The company could publish its findings in February. Additional technical details are found in the group's website here.
Many Thanks to biffzinker for the tip.
Source:
The Register
"LVI turns previous data extraction attacks around, like Meltdown, Foreshadow, ZombieLoad, RIDL and Fallout, and defeats all existing mitigations. Instead of directly leaking data from the victim to the attacker, we proceed in the opposite direction: we smuggle — "inject" — the attacker's data through hidden processor buffers into a victim program and hijack transient execution to acquire sensitive information, such as the victim's fingerprints or passwords," the reasearchers write in the abstract of their paper describing the vulnerability. Anti-virus manufacturer BitDefender independently discovered LVI and shared its study with Intel. The company could publish its findings in February. Additional technical details are found in the group's website here.
92 Comments on Intel Processors Hit with LVI Security Vulnerabilities, Mitigation Hits Performance Hard
This also seems like an unrelated and inappropriate dig.
And that's a short list. Here's another;
www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/computer/worst-mac-virus-malware.htm
MacOS is solid for sure, however it is anything but bullet-proof.
It isn't btarunr's fault, even. We are grimy over puns such as these:I like this sort of thing, just my sort of zero risk bias. However, just look at what the focus is on:
AMD CPUs are vulnerable to a severe new side-channel attack
The gaslight is just too intense here. Either sarcastic for noninvolved, or overly dramatic for involved parties, there is just no redeeming quality of such shitty captioning.
That is what we should assemble against, imo.
But yes, he is.Sensationalism sells, applies here as well as the media. Is it profesional? No. Does that stop anyone? No.Both? One applies to linux, and the other windows? You do realize kernel.org parameters are for the linux kernel and not the MS one, right?Survivership bias. It only takes one.
The other thing is... if a piece of software gets recompiled with worse feature set, having workarounds... it will be slower by definition... Basically... there ain't no good scenario, good ending here.
The idea the bounty program should be accelerated as much they can, to ensure future products don't suffer from it anymore. This generation is tossable for sure.
AMD FX 9590 to Intel 9900K: "I am no longer afraid from you!".
Security Disclosures on Theoretical Intel CPU Flaws Are Becoming Ridiculous
www.extremetech.com/computing/307433-security-disclosures-on-theoretical-intel-cpu-flaws-are-becoming-ridiculous
"Unfortunately, it’s starting to look like the PR departments working with security researchers the world over have taken a very real problem with problematic leakage of data in side-channel attacks and are now spinning theoretical scenarios that aren’t backed up by the data in the documents themselves. "
In other words, security researchers (or security research firms’ PR divisions) are now putting out reports claiming Intel CPU’s are catastrophically at-risk from theoretical attacks that haven’t even been created yet, even though these attacks are incredibly difficult or downright theoretical. This is an absurdity.
Asking a company to design hardware intelligently to mitigate existing or well-known risks is one thing. Asking it to design hardware that secures against esoteric attacks that haven’t even been demonstrated in real-world testing yet is ridiculous. Even Bitdefender’s Director of Threat Research agrees that this attack isn’t one Intel should realistically bother securing against because it’s so hard to deploy.
We’re starting to hear about ‘theoretical’ risks to both Intel and AMD and threats that could emerge someday, but, you know, don’t actually exist right now. There’s nothing wrong with planning ahead, but given the long development cycles that CPUs go through, there’s no practical way for Intel to build a 2020 CPU to handle every possible security flaw that might be found in software, hardware, or both by 2025. The nature of security flaws is that after you patch one, people go out and find another. I'm increasingly convinced that Intel isn’t being treated fairly by these reports, and it’s not just Intel. Earlier this week we covered another instance where the PR verbiage around an AMD flaw didn’t match what the actual security researchers said in public.
These "security warnings" are akin to "Well we all could fly of the planet .... if we lived in a world w/o gravity."
No one is going to lose 90% of their performance unless they are running a state nuclear program.
your xeon can now be a Celerom Yay
This collide+probe load+reload script kinda serves to break ASLR encryption from 28 to 15 bits on most accounts. It might not seem much, but 65K is a lot sooner than 268M through brute forcing. Coupled with that, presuming the way predictor gets decyphered even more, the suspect attack vector as described to me goes as such,