{"id":10311,"date":"2018-01-04T10:00:51","date_gmt":"2018-01-04T09:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.credativ.de\/blog\/credativ-inside\/the-processor-as-a-security-vulnerability\/"},"modified":"2018-01-04T10:00:51","modified_gmt":"2018-01-04T09:00:51","slug":"the-processor-as-a-security-vulnerability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.credativ.de\/en\/blog\/news\/the-processor-as-a-security-vulnerability\/","title":{"rendered":"The Processor as a Security Vulnerability"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the beginning of 2018, issues with memory management and Intel processors became public. According to these reports, it is apparently possible to read arbitrary areas of the kernel and userspace memory regions and thus potentially gain access to sensitive areas. <\/p>\n

Over the past few days, there have been rumors and speculations about the direction of these developments; meanwhile, there is an official statement from the hackers at Project Zero (Google) who summarize<\/a> the findings.<\/p>\n

What exactly happened?<\/h1>\n

Essentially, attack vectors were identified that can extract privileged information from the CPU cache, despite a lack of authorization, by leveraging unsuccessful speculative code execution on a processor and precise timing. In doing so, it is possible, despite the lack of authorization (whether from user or kernel space), to read memory areas and interpret their contents. This theoretically enables widespread entry points for malware, such as spying on sensitive data or abusing permissions. These are referred to as Side Channel Attacks. According to current knowledge, not only Intel CPUs (which were initially exclusively assumed to be affected) are impacted, but also AMD CPUs, ARM, and POWER8 and 9 processors. <\/p>\n

What is currently happening?<\/h1>\n

Project Zero summarizes the main issues in the report<\/a>. Several exploits exist that use different approaches to read privileged memory areas, thereby unauthorizedly accessing information in sensitive areas of the kernel or other processes. Since almost all modern CPUs support speculative execution of instructions to prevent their execution units from idling and thus avoid associated high latencies, a large number of systems are theoretically affected. Another starting point for this attack scenario is the way user and kernel space memory areas interact in current systems. In fact, these memory areas have not truly been separated until now; instead, access to these areas is secured by a special bit. The advantage of this lack of separation is particularly significant when, for example, frequent switching between user and kernel space is required. <\/p>\n

The individual attack scenarios are:<\/p>\n