A Major Security Vulnerability Has Plagued 'Nearly All' Intel CPUs For Years

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the whoops-a-daisy dept

Intel is in for a very challenging few weeks. Reports began to bubble forth this week suggesting that “nearly all” intel chipsets (and some chipsets from other vendors) have been plagued by a security vulnerability over the last decade that could impact millions upon millions of users. While the full details of the vulnerability have been largely been kept under secret embargo by the security community, the scale of the flaw appears to be monumental. From what’s currently known, the vulnerability currently allows programs to gain access to the layout or contents of what previously was believed to be protected kernel memory.

You know, the area where everything from passwords, login keys, and files cached from disk are presumably stored away from prying eyes. The problem appears to be unprecedented, and the entire security community is rushing to quickly push out updates for the problem:

“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.

So for one, this appears to have been in the wild for years, raising questions as to whether this has already been exploited by the intelligence community and others. And while the nature of the vulnerability isn’t being fully disclosed, AMD hinted at the structure of a problem in an e-mail over the holiday to the Linux kernel mailing list stating that AMD products aren’t affected:

“AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel page table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault.”

At least one computer science PHD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam claims to have already developed a proof of concept capable of exploiting the flaw to read kernel memory from user mode:

And while the vulnerability can be patched on the OS level (patches for the Linux kernel are already available even though the notes try to tap dance around the true nature of the issue), early reports indicate these updates could come with a much as a 30% performance penalty, something that will make gamers and other enthusiasts likely weep:

“Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we’re looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. More recent Intel chips have features ? such as PCID ? to reduce the performance hit. Your mileage may vary.”

In other words, Intel’s not only about to take a severe beating for a massive security vulnerability, but the performance of much of its product lineup is about to be dramatically impacted by the fix, which could flood the market with people looking for new, unimpacted CPUs. That’s likely great news for AMD sales, but notably less so for Intel PR reps coming off of their holiday break, who’ll be tasked with softening the perceived impact of the flaw ahead of more details in a week or two.

Filed Under: chipsets, intel, security
Companies: intel