Wednesday, August 10th 2022
ÆPIC Leak is an Architectural CPU Bug Affecting 10th, 11th, and 12th Gen Intel Core Processors
The x86 CPU family has been vulnerable to many attacks in recent years. With the arrival of Spectre and Meltdown, we have seen side-channel attacks overtake both AMD and Intel designs. However, today we find out that researchers are capable of exploiting Intel's latest 10th, 11th, and 12th generation Core processors with a new CPU bug called ÆPIC Leak. Named after Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) that handles interrupt requests to regulate multiprocessing, the leak is claimeing to be the first "CPU bug able to architecturally disclose sensitive data." Researchers Pietro Borrello (Sapienza University of Rome), Andreas Kogler (Graz Institute of Technology), Martin Schwarzl (Graz), Moritz Lipp (Amazon Web Services), Daniel Gruss (Graz University of Technology), and Michael Schwarz (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security) discovered this flaw in Intel processors.
Source:
ÆPIC Leak
ÆPIC Leak is the first CPU bug able to architecturally disclose sensitive data. It leverages a vulnerability in recent Intel CPUs to leak secrets from the processor itself: on most 10th, 11th and 12th generation Intel CPUs the APIC MMIO undefined range incorrectly returns stale data from the cache hierarchy. In contrast to transient execution attacks like Meltdown and Spectre, ÆPIC Leak is an architectural bug: the sensitive data gets directly disclosed without relying on any (noisy) side channel. ÆPIC Leak is like an uninitialized memory read in the CPU itself.You can try out the vulnerability as it's demonstration has been open-sourced by Graz Institute of Technology here. Currently, we have no information about the patch, but Intel has been made aware in December of 2021. Carrying a CVE tag CVE-2022-21233, the vulnerability can be avoided by disabling APIC MMIO or avoiding SGX.
A privileged attacker (Administrator or root) is required to access APIC MMIO. Thus, most systems are safe from ÆPIC Leak. However, systems relying on SGX to protect data from privileged attackers would be at risk, thus, have to be patched.
50 Comments on ÆPIC Leak is an Architectural CPU Bug Affecting 10th, 11th, and 12th Gen Intel Core Processors
AMD today made public CVE-2021-46778 that university researchers have dubbed the "SQUIP" attack as a side channel vulnerability affecting the execution unit scheduler across Zen 1/2/3 processors.
Researchers discovered that execution unit scheduler contention could lead to a side channel vulnerability on AMD Zen 1, Zen 2, and Zen 3 processors -- across all Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC generations to this point. This side-channel vulnerability exists only when SMT is active and relies on measuring the contention level of scheduler queues in order to leak sensitive information.
That's been patched and came out in 2021.
Who exactly relies only on SGX to protect data out there?
Surely Intel/AMD has competent engineers that think about every scenario when designing the mitigations? Well... that's not true, and Intel had to provide additional patches exactly for the VM scenario, because the built-in hardware mitigation in Alder Lake+ was found to be lacking.
To the average user this means literally nothing.
It's like saying... "A burglar who is already in your house, might be able to overhear a sensitive conversation through one of the inner walls because it's too thin."
On the other end are the "IT Managers" or "SVP of Technology & Infrastructure", who get paid ALOT of money to sit around in meetings with the other execs, dreaming up IT budgets for the upcoming fiscal year while minimizing costs and expenditures, and push out memos about how up to date the company is and how the "forward thinking plans" they are developing will "keep the company on the cutting edge" of technology.... most of which sound as bad or worse than the marketing garbaggio that is dreamed up the press releases we see posted here.
See AMD’s website www.amd.com/en/corporate/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-1039
note the initial publication date of “8-9-2022”
stefangast.eu/papers/squip.pdf
A clue would be, it doesn't say 2022 does it, found in 2021, fixed, then reported in 22.
Google it FFS.
Patched, then published, as all good issues are.
Now off with your Intel lurvin whataboutism weak ass shit.
So confident in your incompetence. The cognitive dissonance is real… AMD’s CPUs have vulnerabilities too. you take it as a personal affront when they’re pointed out. Says a lot more about you than it does about me. Now, run along.
The only concern would be if this can be executed across VMs, which really only applies to cloud services, but sensitive/critical services should never run in the cloud anyways. Anyone in the industry knows security is done in layers; If there is a bug in hardware, firmware or the OS, usually the higher levels will protect until the problem is resolved/mitigated. In the public cloud, if there is a hardware or hypervisor bug, then all the other security measures can be bypassed. It's hard to measure competence in IT, which is probably contributing to a lot of unqualified staff, and this is even a problem for "experienced" staff, some people just never know what they're doing or don't care.
I once saw a company wanting to ramp up their security hire a team of "security experts", which were so incompetent in introducing "well established security principles" like two-factor authentication and using a service from a "tried and tested" third-party, they managed to make it worse than not having it, as there were fundamental flaws in the setup resulting in several attack vectors.
Then today reported it to the world, but it isn't new , it is fixed and as is said it's in the name. Cve 2021 wtaf.
Now on topic , without bias, no you aren't capable.
And I couldn't care less, except you spouted nonsense and still are in a auto defence stance, what about them though?!.
Oh and I didn't say anything against Intel here, it is what it is, a server security issue, though my private data could be on those server's.
From AMD
"AMD was informed about the issue in December 2021 and assigned it the CVE identifier CVE-2021-46778 and a severity rating of ‘medium’. The chip giant published an advisory on Tuesday, informing customers that Zen 1, Zen 2 and Zen 3 microarchitectures are impacted.
The list of affected products includes Ryzen, Athlon and EPYC processors for desktops, workstations, mobile devices, Chromebooks, and servers.
While Intel and Apple products are currently not impacted, they have been notified as well."
Whenever the AMD vulnerability post comes out, bet you'll be the first one to comment. Fair enough, shareholder.