Speculative Execution and Indirect Branch Prediction Side Channel Analysis Method

Summary:

Updated Recommendations Section 04/04/2018

Today a team of security researchers disclosed several software analysis methods that, when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from many types of computing devices with many different vendors’ processors and operating systems.

Intel is committed to product and customer security and to responsible disclosure. We worked closely with many other technology companies, including AMD, ARM Holdings and several operating system vendors, to develop an industry-wide approach to mitigate this issue promptly and constructively.

For facts about these new exploits, and steps you can take to help protect your systems and information please visit: <https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/facts-about-side-channel-analysis-and-intel-products.html&gt;.

Description:

Systems with microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and indirect branch prediction may allow unauthorized disclosure of information to an attacker with local user access via a side-channel analysis.

• 5.6 Medium CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N

Affected products:

For non-Intel based systems please contact your system manufacturer or microprocessor vendor (AMD, ARM, Qualcomm, etc.) for updates.

A list of impacted products can be found here.

Recommendations:

Updated 04/04/2018

Intel has worked with operating system vendors, equipment manufacturers, and other ecosystem partners to develop platform firmware and software updates that can help protect systems from these methods.

This includes the release of updated Intel microprocessor microcode to our customers and partners. Details can be found here: <http://newsroom.intel.com/microcode&gt;

End users and systems administrators should check with their OEM and system software vendors and apply any available updates as soon as practical.

For non-Intel based systems please contact your system manufacturer or microprocessor vendor (AMD, ARM, Qualcomm, etc.) for updates.

Other variants of this side-channel analysis are being addressed by Operating System and Software Vendors. For more details see:

• CVE-2017-5753
• CVE-2017-5754

Additional CVE Advisory Guidance available here.

Acknowledgements:

Intel would like to thank Jann Horn with Google Project Zero for his original report and for working with the industry on coordinated disclosure.

Intel would also like to thank the following researchers for working with us on coordinated disclosure.

• Moritz Lipp, Michael Schwarz, Daniel Gruss, Stefan Mangard from Graz University of Technology
• Paul Kocher, Daniel Genkin from University of Pennsylvania and University of Maryland, Mike Hamburg from Rambus, Cryptography Research Division and Yuval Yarom from University of Adelaide and Data61
• Thomas Prescher and Werner Haas from Cyberus Technology, Germany
• Kekai Hu, Ke Sun, Henrique Kawakami, Rodrigo Branco from Intel