Live data from Hacker News

ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

cyberus-technology.de

171–180 of 337 posts

Re: ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

#171
post #76

What is the recommended course of action? Stop buying Intel products, and devices which contain them? What about devices with older processors? I'm still running a Sandy Bridge rig and it works fine, except for the side channel vulnerablities. It's probably not going to be patched. I also have a cheaper computer with a Skylake processor, which is newer yet still vulnerable! It's only a matter of time until something…

I don't think anyone is talking about courses of action yet. "What you should do about it" is really out of scope for announcing a vulnerability; what you should do is often contextual anyway.

Like, what exactly are you hoping to hear? A bunch of our existing processors leak information, and it's a big problem. Big problems don't always have quick, clean solutions. Sorry.

Re: ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

#172
post #76

What is the recommended course of action? Stop buying Intel products, and devices which contain them? What about devices with older processors? I'm still running a Sandy Bridge rig and it works fine, except for the side channel vulnerablities. It's probably not going to be patched. I also have a cheaper computer with a Skylake processor, which is newer yet still vulnerable! It's only a matter of time until something…

> What is the recommended course of action? Stop buying Intel products, and devices which contain them? There is absolutely nothing to be done on our level about this. I'm fairly convinced this is systemic issue that can only be solved by redesigning almost entirely modern cpus and computers architecture. I can draw a parallel to approximately all Intel cpus which are know to have a dedicated "mini cpu" called "Minix…

Me being a caveman who believes that technology is a hammer that still can be used to drive nails into building materials instead of our own heads, I'm longing for an Intermesh of simple networked 8-bit machines running on vanilla (no ARM core bonuses) FPGAs, with CPUs simple enough to be predictable and understood not by a select few superhumans in the world, but by a critical mass of people, and communication protocols built from scratch with privacy and security in mind, so that such device could represent a social node: here's some info that I chose to make public, and there's my protected data. A single pedestrian FPGA could host a swarm of such tiny CPUs, each dedicated to a single task or security domain: a CPU to talk to shared filesystem, a CPU to talk to the private one, one more to process input, one to Tx/Rx bytes over the wire etc..

Or, if that is too complex, there could just be a bunch of breadboarded ICs capable of networking. There actually are real-world examples of such machines exposed via telnet, e.g. http://www.homebrewcpu.com

And all the performance beasts, while surely indispensable, could just enjoy their air-gapped solitude. Are there any massively parallel supercomputing tasks whose results couldn't be summarized and reduced to mere text, which is not too hard to move over the airgap manually?

Re: ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

#173
post #149
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is more like Meltdown in that it involves one context just outright accessing data in a completely different context, and AMD chips seem to be totally immune from that attack. No, AMD has been largely immune to bugs involving speculating past a page fault . Both Meltdown and L1TF involved speculating past page faults, and the ZombieLoad paper also mentions exploiting bad behavior during page faults (but, discl…

Spectre variant 2 was a little more interesting in that it can trick the processor into speculative execution of something that's not a valid execution path for the victim context (by confusing it about the target of an indirect branch), but it still relies on the speculative execution happening in a context that is meant to have access to the targetted data. It's sort of halfway between this and the other Spectre va…

> All three of these latest vulnerabilities are like Meltdown and L1TF in that they just allow speculative execution to completely ignore hardware-level access protections and read data from a completely different process

Not really. These attacks are completely different from Meltdown and L1TF in that they don't involve reading from memory at all. They involve hidden processor state that contains values that were recently used in another context. The attacker never explicitly specifies an address they are interested in -- they just get whatever's floating around.

A comparable (but much more obvious) bug would be if the OS failed to clear registers when switching contexts. Although the values in those registers may have at one point been read from memory, the attacker recovering those values isn't directly accessing the victim's memory.

Your comments seem to be arguing that AMD isn't affected by these bugs for the same reason they weren't affected by Meltdown. But these bugs operate in a totally different way and exploit totally different components. There doesn't appear to be any reason to believe they are related.

I think the reason AMD isn't affected likely has to do with the fact that these attacks are targeting specific implementation details of Intel processors, which AMD processors probably just happen to implement differently. (Indeed, Fallout appears to be attacking outright unintentional behavior -- it would be surprising if multiple CPUs had the same bug.) It seems likely to me that AMD has different bugs which haven't been found yet, perhaps mostly because researchers haven't focused on them.

(Disclosure: I own some AMD stock. I don't own Intel stock. I have no other affiliation with either company.)

Re: ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

#174

So at what point do we start producing CPUs specifically aimed at running a kernel/userland? Why don't we have a CPU architecture where a master core is dedicated to running the kernel and a bunch of other cores run userland programs? I am genuinely curious. I understand that x86 is now the dominant platform in cloud computing. But it's not like virtualization needs to be infinitely nested, right? Why not have the ho…

> Why don't we have a CPU architecture where a master core is dedicated to running the kernel and a bunch of other cores run userland programs? How will your "userland core" switch to other userland programs safely? A pointer-dereference can be a MMap'd file, so its actually I/O. This will cause the userland program to enter kernel-mode to interact with the hardware (yes, on code as simple as blah = (this->next)... t…

Sounds like we would need a new paradigm for how to handle that. But it seems to me that x86 is in now way the panacea of COU design. Wouldn’t you gain some good trade offs by changing up how things are done?

Re: ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

#175

So at what point do we start producing CPUs specifically aimed at running a kernel/userland? Why don't we have a CPU architecture where a master core is dedicated to running the kernel and a bunch of other cores run userland programs? I am genuinely curious. I understand that x86 is now the dominant platform in cloud computing. But it's not like virtualization needs to be infinitely nested, right? Why not have the ho…

You'd also need to duplicate the whole memory hierarchy of CPU caches to prevent cache attacks against your "kernel CPU".

Would the kernel even need RAM access for its internal operations? It seems like today’s CPU caches are so large that a kernel could safely operating without ever leaving the chip, aside from anything that the userland asks it to work on. So in that case you wouldn’t need to ever run userland code against kernel CPU’s caches.

Re: ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

#176
post #82
post #3

Pandora's box was opened with the public disclosure of Spectre and Meltdown. Security researchers will continue to find new and better ways of attacking the security boundaries in processors, and there's unlikely to be an end to this any time soon. Exciting time to be in security, not such an exciting time to be a potential victim.

Security by obscurity is no security

That's cryptography at scale in a nutshell, thus far it seems to be a fair enough countermeasure. Cryptography on an individual item with an unknown cipher/salt/hash can be treated as security via entropy - but with a big enough data set and some idea of the target content, things quickly devolve into security via obscurity since the target content is discoverable with enough time and computational resources. Security via "untamperability" (quantum bits/state) is better, alas we're not quite there yet.

My biggest worry is that all currently known classical "secure" data sets, including encrypted but recorded internet communication, will become an open book a few decades from now. What insights will the powers that be choose draw from it then, and how will that impact our future society? Food for thought.

Re: ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

#177

Apparently Intel attempted to play down the issue by trying to award the researchers with the 40,000 dollar tier reward and a separate 80,000 dollar reward as a "gift" (which the researchers kindly denied) instead of the maximum 100,000 reward for finding a critical vulnerability. Intel was also planning to wait for at least another 6 months before bringing this to light if it wasn't for the researchers threatening t…

You have to admire the complex complicity. Someone smart enough to understand the depths of the problem had to guide that conversation

Or just someone paranoid enough that this would be their standard response if they poll the researchers and one of them says "this could be New York Times big"

Re: ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

#178
post #88
post #76

What is the recommended course of action? Stop buying Intel products, and devices which contain them? What about devices with older processors? I'm still running a Sandy Bridge rig and it works fine, except for the side channel vulnerablities. It's probably not going to be patched. I also have a cheaper computer with a Skylake processor, which is newer yet still vulnerable! It's only a matter of time until something…

The stream of critical CPU vulnerabilities starting with Spectre/Meltdown last year are related to speculative execution , not just Intel. (AMD and ARM CPUs are also vulnerable to Spectre, for example.) Intel CPUs are sometimes vulnerable to additional attacks because they speculate in more scenarios than other designs. But fundamentally, as long as multiple different trust domains are sharing one CPU that speculates…

We were talking about alternative CPU designs and a guy commented on how much of the volume of a CPU is memory these days.

I wondered aloud if it wouldn’t be better for use to embrace NUMA, make the bigger caches directly addressable as working memory instead of using them as cache.

Re: ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

#179
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not reading anything against responsible disclosure in deaken's comments. How are you getting that?

The whole "since they published that it happened, we've had a bunch of disclosures" which is a typical "I don't feel safer when people talk openly about unfixed vulnerabilities" argument.

Err no, no it's not. It's that there's been a ton more attention there. We're no more or less safe than we were before, we simply didn't know about the bugs that were there.

(FYI, I've been a security researcher for 15+ years and work as the head of hacker education for HackerOne; I am very, very pro disclosure. :) )

Re: ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

#180
post #76

What is the recommended course of action? Stop buying Intel products, and devices which contain them? What about devices with older processors? I'm still running a Sandy Bridge rig and it works fine, except for the side channel vulnerablities. It's probably not going to be patched. I also have a cheaper computer with a Skylake processor, which is newer yet still vulnerable! It's only a matter of time until something…

> Stop buying Intel products, and devices which contain them? None of that helps with your public cloud workloads.

If only you could target the processor type for your cloud instances...

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/amd/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-lv2-se...

Post reply on HN