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ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs

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

#41

Post by dchest »

gmueckl wrote: post #14

These CPU flaws make it seem as if virtualization in the data center is becoming really, really dangerous. If these exploits continue to appear, the only way forward would be dedicated machines for each application of each customer. Essentially, this might be killing the cloud by 1000 papercuts because it loses efficiency and cost effectiveness and locally hosted hardware does not necessarily have to have all mitigat…

Except most companies don't care about security of the cloud apart from the magical "compliance" and that they are on the same cloud as everyone else.

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

#42

Post by icelancer »

gambler wrote: post #20
mr_overalls wrote: post #17

At what point do we simply revert to using typewriters for authoring sensitive documents, and pneumatic tubes (couriers for WAN) for networking? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/15/germany-typewr...

We don't need to revert to typewriters. We just need computers designed with a real security model in mind, instead of piles of ah-hoc mitigations. However, I bet no one will invest in it until one of these exploits bring down AWS, take over Google's crawlers or something else of that sort.

>> We just need computers designed with a real security model in mind

These are already options, as another commenter pointed out. If you need this kind of protection, it is available, at significant cost.

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

#43

Post by TomVDB »

faissaloo wrote: post #18
jamiek88 wrote: post #5

9% hit potentially on performance in data center. Add in all the Spectre and meltdown mitigations and we have potentially lost nearly two generations of Intel performance increases. Just shows the hoops and tricks needed to keep making, on paper, faster processors year on year but without node shrinks to give headroom. 14nm++++ is played out.

I wonder at what point the hardware fix for these issues stop becoming worthwhile and if we'll see a resurgence of processors without speculative execution or any of these other speed ups.

If ARM and AMD CPUs are not affected, then speculative execution in general is not the issue.

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

#44

Post by dschuetz »

It takes one rouge/unpatched VM to run and scan threads randomly, undetected over a longer period of time, if not patched. With HT disabled potential hits become less likely, but still possible given time. Is virtualization on Intel dead now? Perhaps not. But, it's increasingly dangerous to use Intel for cloud services.

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

#45

Post by farisjarrah »

dexen wrote: post #38
Tharkun wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, OpenBSD's Theo De Raadt made a sneer at virtualization, saying something the lines of "they can't even build a secure system, let alone a secure virtualized system". I can't remember who he was referring to specifically, but we've certainly been seeing a lot of similar vulnerabilities.

Here's the full Theo de Raadt quote from 2007 [1]: """> Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits. You've been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you should share it. x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side…

I feel like people with these sorts of hardline views on security, might just be so concerned with safety that their argument misses the whole opportunity cost of not being 100% safe in our usage of technology. If we needed to make sure everything was safe and perfectly secure, the world would have missed out on a lot of innovative software. Tough thing to contend with is that the security people are hardly ever wrong.

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

#46

Post by smhenderson »

Tharkun wrote: post #26
gmueckl wrote: post #14

These CPU flaws make it seem as if virtualization in the data center is becoming really, really dangerous. If these exploits continue to appear, the only way forward would be dedicated machines for each application of each customer. Essentially, this might be killing the cloud by 1000 papercuts because it loses efficiency and cost effectiveness and locally hosted hardware does not necessarily have to have all mitigat…

Many years ago, OpenBSD's Theo De Raadt made a sneer at virtualization, saying something the lines of "they can't even build a secure system, let alone a secure virtualized system". I can't remember who he was referring to specifically, but we've certainly been seeing a lot of similar vulnerabilities.

I believe "they" were all the people poking the project asking when were they going to support virtual X and virtual Y. He basically stated it would never happen on OpenBSD[1] but here we are with [2] (vmm/vmd/vmctl).

[1] http://www.tylerkrpata.com/2007/10/theo-de-raadt-on-x86-virt...

[2] https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq16.html

[1] probably isn't the best source out there, I was in a bit of a rush to find it but that is indeed the quote! Gotta either love or hate Theo I guess!

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

#47

Post by egwor »

faissaloo wrote: post #18
jamiek88 wrote: post #5

9% hit potentially on performance in data center. Add in all the Spectre and meltdown mitigations and we have potentially lost nearly two generations of Intel performance increases. Just shows the hoops and tricks needed to keep making, on paper, faster processors year on year but without node shrinks to give headroom. 14nm++++ is played out.

I wonder at what point the hardware fix for these issues stop becoming worthwhile and if we'll see a resurgence of processors without speculative execution or any of these other speed ups.

Do these really matter if you're running a compute farm? If you're already locked down couldn't you use that as a way to mitigate risks?

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

#48

Post by Thaxll »

gmueckl wrote: post #14

These CPU flaws make it seem as if virtualization in the data center is becoming really, really dangerous. If these exploits continue to appear, the only way forward would be dedicated machines for each application of each customer. Essentially, this might be killing the cloud by 1000 papercuts because it loses efficiency and cost effectiveness and locally hosted hardware does not necessarily have to have all mitigat…

You should use large instance that don't share the same CPU socket, on AWS for example it would be c5.9xlarge and above.

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

#49

Post by robotresearcher »

ksec wrote: post #10

Sorry for being naive. Are these kind of CPU Securities vulnerabilities new? Why it is in the past 20 years we have had close to zero in the news ( At least I wasn't aware of any ) and ever since Spectre and Meltdown we have something new like every few months. And as far as I am aware they are mostly Intel CPU only. Why? And Why not AMD? Something in the Intel design process went wrong? And yet all the Cloud Vendor…

Since there is relatively little AMD running, you would expect relatively little investment in attacking it.

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

#50

Post by dexen »

farisjarrah wrote: post #45
dexen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the full Theo de Raadt quote from 2007 [1]: """> Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits. You've been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you should share it. x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side…

I feel like people with these sorts of hardline views on security, might just be so concerned with safety that their argument misses the whole opportunity cost of not being 100% safe in our usage of technology. If we needed to make sure everything was safe and perfectly secure, the world would have missed out on a lot of innovative software. Tough thing to contend with is that the security people are hardly ever wron…

>hardline views on security

The only hardline view on security you'll encounter in the wild is "security is practical in our computational environments"[1]. Only half-joking here.

My reading of Theo's quote is merely "the combination of x86/IA32/AMD64 and virtualization gives little to no factual security benefits, and plenty of pitfals".

I don't see Theo as being a hardliner about security, just meticulous about good engineering practices - as per OpenBSD's usual standards - and facing the problems & risks as they are.

[1] examples: "Rust/Java gives you security", "shortlisting the only allowed actions by end-user application gives you security", "hardcore firewalls give you security", "virtualization gives you security", "advanced architectures like Burroughs' give you security".

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