HPSBHF03597 rev. 3 - PortSmash Side-Channel Vulnerability

Potential Security Impact

Information disclosure.

Source: HP, HP Product Security Response Team (PSRT)

Reported By: Tampere University of Technology, Finland and Technical University, Cuba

VULNERABILITY SUMMARY

An industry-wide vulnerability has been reported which impacts CPUs that use Simultaneous Multithreading Technology (SMT). The attack consists of running a malicious process in parallel with legitimate processes using the parallel threading capabilities of SMT. The legitimate process leaks small amounts of data to the malicious processes, which could allow an attacker to reconstruct the data that was inside the legitimate process.

RESOLUTION

HP worked with industry partners to analyze the researcher’s findings. Software written using safe algorithms to prevent side channel analysis are not vulnerable to the researchers’ methods. The firmware shipped on HP platforms is not vulnerable to this issue; there will not be any firmware updates published with this security bulletin.

Additional Resources:

AMD article on PortSmash mitigations__ (in English)