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Top Linux developer on Intel chip security problems: 'They're not going away.'

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 29th of October 2019 01:35:35 AM Filed under
Linux
Security

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, could have prefaced his Open Source Summit Europe keynote speech, MDS, Fallout, Zombieland, and Linux, by paraphrasing Winston Churchill: I have nothing to offer but blood sweat and tears for dealing with Intel CPU's security problems.

Or as a Chinese developer told him recently about these problems: "This is a sad talk." The sadness is that the same Intel CPU speculative execution problems, which led to Meltdown and Spectre security issues, are alive and well and causing more trouble.

The problem with how Intel designed speculative execution is that, while anticipating the next action for the CPU to take does indeed speed things up, it also exposes data along the way. That's bad enough on your own server, but when it breaks down the barriers between virtual machines (VM)s in cloud computing environments, it's a security nightmare.

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Running on Intel? If you want security, disable hyper-threading

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 29th of October 2019 04:04:13 PM.
  • Running on Intel? If you want security, disable hyper-threading, says Linux kernel maintainer

    Linux kernel dev Greg Kroah-Hartman reckons Intel Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) - also known as hyper-threading - should be disabled for security due to MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) bugs.

    Kroah-Hartman, who was speaking at the Open Source summit in Lyons, has opened up on the subject before. "I gave a talk last year about Spectre and how Linux reacted to it," he told The Reg. "And then this year it's about things found since the last talk. It's more and more of the same types of problems.

TechRadar's coverage

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 30th of October 2019 05:21:13 PM.
  • Intel CPUs can be exploited unless you disable hyper-threading, Linux dev claims

    If that sounds familiar, you might have remembered it from the ZombieLoad episode back in May, where it first came to light along with other MDS-based exploits including Fallout and RIDL.

    The only way to be truly safe from any potential attack vector along these lines is simply to switch off hyper-threading. Kroah-Hartman said of OpenBSD (an open source security-focused OS): “A year ago they said disable hyper-threading, there’s going to be lots of problems here. They chose security over performance at an earlier stage than anyone else. Disable hyper-threading. That’s the only way you can solve some of these issues. We are slowing down your workloads. Sorry.”

Linux maintainer: Patching side-channel flaws is killing perform

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 31st of October 2019 05:41:06 PM.
  • Linux maintainer: Patching side-channel flaws is killing performance

    Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the worst side-channel vulnerability of them all?

    For a while it was Meltdown and Spectre, the two biggies that kicked off the era of microprocessor security worry in early 2018, followed some months later by another contender, PortSmash.

    In May this year, news emerged of more weaknesses with fancy names – ZombieLoad (CVE-2018-12130), RIDL, and Fallout (CVE-2018-12126, CVE-2018-12127, CVE-2018-12130, CVE-2019-11091).

    The thread loosely holding this list together is a new class of weaknesses known as Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) flaws, in the case of PostSmash and ZombieLoad in Intel’s Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) hyper-threading.

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