Security Bulletin: NVIDIA Jetson TX2 L4T Security Updates for CPU Speculative Side Channel Vulnerabilities

Jetson L4T response to CPU speculative side channel vulnerabilities - CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715, CVE-2017-5754

Bulletin Summary

NVIDIA is providing an initial security update to mitigate aspects of Google Project Zero’s January 3, 2018, publication of novel information disclosure attacks that combine CPU speculative execution with known side channels.

NVIDIA believes Jetson TX2 GPU hardware is immune to the reported security issue. Jetson TX2 integrates Arm-based (CPU) processors that may, in certain circumstances, benefit from software mitigations to reduce the risk of the exploits identified in the Google Project Zero disclosure. For more information, refer to the Arm Security Update.

This bulletin addresses NVIDIA software updates for Jetson TX2 to mitigate aspects of the potential CPU vulnerabilities.

These potential vulnerabilities have three known variants:

• Variant 1 (CVE-2017-5753): Software mitigations for the Arm CPU issue are provided with the security update included in this bulletin. NVIDIA expects to work together with its ecosystem partners as future updates are released to further strengthen mitigations for the potentially affected CPU.

• Variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715): Software mitigations for the Arm CPU issue are provided with the security update included in this bulletin. NVIDIA expects to work together with its ecosystem partners as future updates are released to further strengthen mitigations for the potentially affected CPU.

• Variant 3 (CVE-2017-5754): NVIDIA believes that Jetson TX2 is not vulnerable to this variant.

• Variant 3a (CVE-2017-5754): Based on Arm’s Security Update, NVIDIA has no reason to believe that Jetson TX2 needs software mitigations for this variant.

For updates and additional information, actively monitor the NVIDIA Product Security page.

Vulnerability Details

The following sections summarize the potential vulnerabilities. Descriptions are as published on MITRE and risk assessments follow CVSS.

CVE-2017-5753

Computer systems with microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and branch prediction may allow unauthorized disclosure of information to unauthorized code with local user access via a side-channel analysis.

CVSS Base Score: 8.2 CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:L/A:N

CVE-2017-5715

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

CVSS Base Score: 8.2 CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:L/A:N

CVE-2017-5754

Computer systems with microprocessors utilizing speculative execution may allow unauthorized disclosure of information to unauthorized code with local user access via a side-channel analysis of the data cache.

CVSS Base Score: 7.9 CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:L/A:N

NVIDIA’s risk assessment is based on an average of risk across a diverse set of installed systems and may not represent the true risk of your local installation. NVIDIA recommends consulting a security or IT professional to evaluate the risk of your specific configuration. NVIDIA doesn’t know of any exploits to these issues at this time.

Updated Products

Product	Integrated CPU	OS
Jetson TX2

• Arm Cortex-A57 processor
• Armv8-A NVIDIA processor
  | Linux for Tegra

Security Updates

When available, download updates from NVIDIA DevZone.

Product Series	OS	Updated Version
Jetson TX2	Linux for Tegra	BSP 28.2

Acknowledgements

None.