![]() ![]() “There are tons of follow up works discovering new variations of these attacks or putting these attacks into context,” he explained. Gruss added that research into chip-level security has become a fertile field since Meltdown broke in January 2018. “We said, from the start, that the performance hit won't be significant and remain unnoticeable for most users and use cases,” he told The Daily Swig. Certainly, most users wouldn’t have noticed much if any difference.”ĭaniel Gruss, a security researcher at Graz University of Technology and member of one of the three teams that uncovered the Meltdown vulnerability, agreed with this assessment. To be honest, I’m not sure the great slow down that was forecast has happened. Professor Alan Woodward, a computer scientist at the University of Surrey, UK, commented: “The Spectre and Meltdown problems have been mitigated reasonably well by the chip makers and the operating system vendors. Performance hits of between 5-30% (depending on workload) were seen in early testing of software fixes, but the effect has been nowhere as severe in practice, according to experts including the original Meltdown authors and others quizzed by The Daily Swig. ![]() This was especially inconvenient since the risks to cloud-based environments, in particular, were too severe to disregard. Most unusually, patching the vulnerabilities incurred a performance hit. Operating system developers and cloud service providers scrambled to develop and roll out fixes to defend against Meltdown/Spectre before the vulnerabilities became public knowledge in early January last year. Spectre – which is harder to exploit but potentially even more damaging – impacted a much wider range of processor makers, including AMD and ARM. Meltdown was largely restricted to Intel processors. The Spectre vulnerability created a means to tear down the isolation between different applications, to similar malign effect. This set up the possibility of a CPU ‘race condition’, where an instruction might be executed before their privileges are checked.Ĭontrols normally restrict user applications from accessing protected kernel memory, but the Meltdown vulnerability offered a means to circumvent these protections, opening the door for malicious code to steal passwords and other sensitive information on vulnerable systems. In order to make computers work faster, modern hardware allows instructions to be run out of sequence or in parallel across the different processing units within the CPU. The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities both stemmed from security shortcomings in computer processor design. The Spectre/Meltdown disclosures in January last year shook long-held assumptions about processor hardware security.īut even though the problems forced fundamental redesigns, it has not resulted in the industry taking the performance hit that some initially expected, The Daily Swig can reveal. ![]() Running kernel: 2.6.32-696.23.1.el6.Chip-level vulnerability issues restricted to high-end workloads Script displays that my system is fully mitigated with kernel 2.6.32-696.20.1.el6.x86_64 but vulnerable with newer kernel 2.6.32-696.23.1.el6.x86_64 ? (VMware with fixed BIOS and ESX) Is mounting debugfs on a production system a bad idea? PTI: Not disabled on kernel commandline IBPB: Not disabled on kernel commandlineĬVE-2017-5754 - speculative execution permission faults handling IBRS: Not disabled on kernel commandline Running kernel: 2.6.32-696.18.7.el6.x86_64ĬVE-2017-5753 - speculative execution bounds-check bypassĬVE-2017-5715 - speculative execution branch target injection Result may be inaccurate for other RPM based systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems and kernel packages. ![]() This script is primarily designed to detect Spectre / Meltdown on supported ~]$ sudo mount -t debugfs nodev /sys/kernel/debug Thanks - yes with debugfs mounted, I get that Variant 3 is Mitigated. ![]()
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