Weakness (CWE)
CWE-1303: Non-Transparent Sharing of Microarchitectural Resources
Hardware structures shared across execution contexts (e.g., caches and branch predictors) can violate the expected architecture isolation between contexts.
More detail
Modern processors use techniques such as out-of-order execution, speculation, prefetching, data forwarding, and caching to increase performance. Details about the implementation of these techniques are hidden from the programmer's view. This is problematic when the hardware implementation of these techniques results in resources being shared across supposedly isolated contexts. Contention for shared resources between different contexts opens covert channels that allow malicious programs executing in one context to recover information from another context.
Some examples of shared micro-architectural resources that have been used to leak information between contexts are caches, branch prediction logic, and load or store buffers. Speculative and out-of-order execution provides an attacker with increased control over which data is leaked through the covert channel.
If the extent of resource sharing between contexts in the design microarchitecture is undocumented, it is extremely difficult to ensure system assets are protected against disclosure.
How to prevent it (2 mitigations)
-
Architecture and Design
Microarchitectural covert channels can be addressed using a mixture of hardware and software mitigation techniques. These include partitioned caches, new barrier and flush instructions, and disabling high resolution performance counters and timers.
-
Requirements
Microarchitectural covert channels can be addressed using a mixture of hardware and software mitigation techniques. These include partitioned caches, new barrier and flush instructions, and disabling high resolution performance counters and timers.
Source: MITRE CWE-1303
5 results · Clear filters · Feed
-
Medium 5.6
AMD Zen Information Disclosure Vulnerability
No cwe for this issue in AMD Zen allows an authorized attacker to disclose information locally.
-
Medium 5.6
AMD Zen Information Disclosure Vulnerability
No cwe for this issue in AMD Zen allows an authorized attacker to disclose information locally.
-
Medium 5.5
Non-transparent sharing of return predictor targets between contexts in some Intel(R) Processors may allow an authorize…
-
Medium 4.1
Non-Transparent Sharing of Microarchitectural Resources in some Intel(R) NUC BIOS firmware may allow a privileged user …
-
Medium 5.6CVE-2023-1998 Public exploit
Spectre v2 SMT mitigations problem in Linux kernel
The Linux kernel allows userspace processes to enable mitigations by calling prctl with PR_SET_SPECULATION_CTRL which disables the speculation feature as well as by using seccomp. We had noticed that on VMs of at least one major cloud provider, the kernel sti…