A vulnerability has been discovered in almost all processors released in the last 20 years

2018-01-04 11:47

A vulnerability has been discovered in almost all processors released in the last 20 years
The problem is serious, but panic is imposed sparingly and with dignity.

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Premature publicity and excessive concern the history of vulnerability in Intel processors, reports Rus.Media.

The company conducted an internal investigation, notifying all partners and competitors (later it turned out that the problem affected all the processors), and was going to make an official announcement on January 9. But was leaked to the press, and talking about the issue. Large companies had to hastily issue press releases, sometimes contradict each other, which created a strong nervous background in the news.

Found vulnerability really exists for a long time: with 1995 or 1997 according to different sources. A bug found in the functionality of the previous calculations of the processor (speculative execution). It works as follows: the processor has several pipelines, for which calculations are carried out. In that moment, when one of the conveyors expects a given program the formula, the unit of preliminary calculations take all possible variables in memory and preemptively makes them simple operations — addition and multiplication. If the function you receive such an operation, the unit of preliminary calculations already has the desired value. Once, it is possible to increase the calculation speed by 20-30%.

If very to simplify, it was found that the exchange of data between the blocks were totally unprotected and using simple OS commands you can access the whole memory. As well as, for example, Desir password is a set of simple mathematical operations, the required data are in a vulnerable region. This is what makes the attack on the vulnerability of this threat.

At the time of writing the news professionals said the possibility of two types of attacks: meltdown — penetration of OS and spectre — entry into running processes.

Developers modern OS is trying to isolate processes from each other. One program may not know what to do at this moment is another program that occurs in her memory. They can interact only by using the special instructions provided for OS — they are called API.

Meltdown allows the malicious program to use all the features of the OS without getting the permission of the user. During this attack, the malicious code cannot get into memory space of other apps — they are encrypted, but you can stop the process and start a new one.

Spectre can get into the memory space of other apps, but much more specialized and less dangerous for ordinary users. In millions of methods, instructions and variables that are executed every minute particular program, not so easy to understand.

Although the disclosure of the vulnerability occurred on specialized sites as a action Thriller, ordinary users is not worth much to fear.

First, laboratory security like Google’s Project Zero has not yet published information about how to create malware based on the vulnerability.

Secondly, despite the premature publicity, companies have had time to prepare patches, and they did it. For Windows this is a patch KB4054022, it should install automatically since 4 Jan. In macOS, the vulnerability was fixed in update 10.13.2. Google promises to release a critical update for their Nexus phones and Pixel, all the other manufacturers on Android as usual update ON smartphones on its own.

The situation with iOS devices is inconsistent, because the consortium has still not given a clear answer, tend La ARM processors A-series vulnerability. One source says Yes, inclined. The other argues that only spectre-attack. Comments from Apple on this score is still there.

Third, to exploit the vulnerability, an attacker must gain physical access to the running computer. The only way he will be able to run malicious code, sample spy software for passwords. Neither via the network nor via the connection ports of the computer to harm will not work.