Flutterby™! : Security Exploits for the new year

Security Exploits for the new year

2018-01-01 19:09:48.011003+00 by Dan Lyke 8 comments

python sweetness: The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table Isolation patches in which it is posited that there's a major security issue in all modern CPU architectures that the maintainers of the NT and Linux kernels are currently rolling out fixes for, but that the fixes are probably going to have huge performance impacts.

And these are likely related to the Rowhammer issues in modern SDRAM.

... And ...

IOHIDeous, a fascinating deep dive:

This is the tale of a macOS-only vulnerability in IOHIDFamily that yields kernel r/w and can be exploited by any unprivileged user.

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Security Exploits for the new year made: 2018-01-02 23:26:14.968977+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

RT @find_evil Jackie Stokes 🙋🏽:

🔥 Link/Discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16046636

🔥 Linux Fix/Backported https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm...589282b87666f92b6c3c917c8080a9bf

🔥 AMD Engineer: "Not affected" link: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2

🔥 Read Brad's TL https://twitter.com/grsecurity/status/947147105684123649

🔥 M$ working on fix https://twitter.com/aionescu/status/930412525111296000

🔥 Bonus Link! https://www.fool.com/investing...eo-just-sold-a-lot-of-stock.aspx

#Comment Re: Security Exploits for the new year made: 2018-01-03 22:39:57.089692+00 by: Dan Lyke

Google Project Zero takes credit for finding the flaw: https://security.googleblog.co...vulnerability-what-you-need.html

#Comment Re: Security Exploits for the new year made: 2018-01-03 23:48:35.364984+00 by: TheSHAD0W

Good god.

#Comment Re: Security Exploits for the new year made: 2018-01-04 01:01:55.1056+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, also: what's gonna happen with cloud compute? Are we suddenly gonna end up paying more for capabilities? Are EC2 and the like performance hits passed on to us? What does this mean for those machine's lifecycles?

Lots of "holy crap" here to go around.

#Comment Re: Security Exploits for the new year made: 2018-01-04 01:05:11.074611+00 by: Dan Lyke

Also worth noting: There are two exploits involved in this, one that's been labeled "meltdown", that's the Intel-only bug that has some potential mitigation with performance costs (but may be exploitable with JavaScript), the other that's been labeled "spectre", and that impacts anything with speculative execution, including ARM and AMD, and is probably only exploitable with native code, but nobody has a mitigation for.

#Comment Re: Security Exploits for the new year made: 2018-01-04 02:12:20.560592+00 by: spc476

The mitigation I've heard for "spectre" is to add MFENCE instructions basically all over the place to prevent speculative execution (added by the compiler). Woot! Compute like it's 1989!

#Comment Re: Security Exploits for the new year made: 2018-01-04 19:49:34.670232+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, sounds like the various JavaScript JIT engines are getting massive slowdowns to make those environments safer.

#Comment Re: Security Exploits for the new year made: 2018-01-05 23:31:44.038963+00 by: Dan Lyke

Why Raspberry Pi isn't vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown

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