One of the most basic premises of computer security is isolation: When you run somebody else’s code as an untrusted process on your machine, then you restrict it to its own tightly sealed test environment. Otherwise, it might peer into other processes, or snoop around the computer as a whole. A security flaw in computers’ most deep-seated hardware puts a crack in those walls, as one newly discovered vulnerability in millions of processors has done, it breaks some of the most fundamental protections computers promise—and sends practically the entire industry scrambling.
A bug in Intel chips allows low-privilege processes to access memory in the computer’s kernel, the machine’s most privileged inner sanctum. Theoretical attacks that exploit that bug, based on quirks in features Intel has implemented for faster processing, could allow malicious software to spy deeply into other processes and data on the target computer or smartphone. On multi-
Meltdown affects Intel processors, and works by breaking through the barrier that prevents applications from accessing arbitrary locations in kernel memory. Segregating and protecting memory spaces prevents applications from accidentally interfering with one another’s data, or malicious software from being able to see and modify it at will. Meltdown makes this fundamental process fundamentally unreliable.
Spectre affects Intel, AMD, and ARM processors, broadening its reach to include mobile phones, embedded devices, and pretty much anything with a chip in it. Which, of course, is everything from thermostats to baby monitors now.
It works differently from Meltdown; Spectre essentially tricks applications into accidentally disclosing information that would normally be inaccessible, safe inside their protected memory area. This is a trickier one to pull off, but because it’s based on an established practice in multiple chip architectures, it’s going to be even trickier to fix.
user machines, like the servers run by Google Cloud Services or Amazon Web Services, they could allow hackers to break out of one user’s process, and instead snoop on other processes running on the same shared server.
It’s not a physical problem with the CPUs themselves, or a plain software bug you might find in an application like Word or Chrome. It’s in between, at the level of the processors’ “architectures,” the way all the millions of transistors and logic units work together to carry out instructions.
In modern architectures, there are inviolable spaces where data passes through in raw, unencrypted form, such as inside the kernel, the most central software unit in the architecture, or in system memory carefully set aside from other applications. This data has powerful protections to prevent it from being interfered with or even observed by other processes and applications.
Because Meltdown and Spectre are flaws at the architecture level, it doesn’t matter whether a computer or device is running Windows, OS X, Android, or something else — all software platforms are equally vulnerable. A huge variety of devices, from laptops to smartphones to servers, are therefore theoretically affected. The assumption going forward should be that any untested device should be considered vulnerable.
Not only that, but Meltdown in particular could conceivably be applied to and across cloud platforms, where huge numbers of networked computers routinely share and transfer data among thousands or millions of users and instances.
The one crumb of comfort is that the attack is easiest to perform by code being run by the machine itself — it’s not easy to pull this off remotely. So there’s that, at least.
On Wednesday evening, a large team of researchers at Google’s Project Zero, universities including the Graz University of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Adelaide in Australia, and security companies including Cyberus and Rambus together released the full details of two attacks based on that flaw, which they call Meltdown and Spectre.
“These hardware bugs allow programs to steal data which [is] currently processed on the computer,” reads a description of the attacks on a website the researchers created. “While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs.”
Both attacks are based on the same general principle, Meltdown allows malicious programs to gain access to higher-privileged parts of a computer’s memory, while Spectre steals data from the memory of other applications running on a machine. And while the researchers say that Meltdown is limited to Intel chips, they say that they’ve verified Spectre attacks on AMD and ARM processors, as well. With these glitches, if there’s any way an attacker can execute code on a machine, then it can’t be contained.
Meltdown and Spectre
When processors perform speculative execution, they don’t fully segregate processes that are meant to be low-privilege and untrusted from the highest-privilege memory in the computer’s kernel. That means a hacker can trick the processor into allowing unprivileged code to peek into the kernel’s memory with speculative execution.
he processor basically runs too far ahead, executing instructions that it should not execute. .
Retrieving any data from that privileged peeking isn’t simple, since once the processor stops its speculative execution and jumps back to the fork in its instructions, it throws out the results. But before it does, it stores those in its cache, a collection of temporary memory allotted to the processor to give it quick access to recent data. By carefully crafting requests to the processor and seeing how fast it responds, a hacker’s code could figure out whether the requested data is in the cache or not. And with a series of speculative execution and cache probes, he or she can start to assemble parts of the computer’s high privilege memory, including even sensitive personal information or passwords.
Many security researchers who spotted signs of developers working to fix that bug had speculated that the Intel flaw merely allowed hackers to defeat a security protection known as Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization, which makes it far more difficult for hackers to find the location of the kernel in memory before they use other tricks to attack it, but the bug is more serious: It allows malicious code to not only locate the kernel in memory, but steal that memory’s contents, too.
Tough Fix
In a statement responding to the Meltdown and Spectre research, Intel noted that “these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify, or delete data,” though they do have the ability to spy on privileged data. The statement also argued that “many types of computing devices—with many different vendors’ processors and operating systems—are susceptible to these exploits,” mentioning ARM and AMD processors as well.
Microsoft, which relies heavily on Intel processors in its computers, says that it has updates forthcoming to address the problem. “We’re aware of this industry-wide issue and have been working closely with chip manufacturers to develop and test mitigations to protect our customers,” the company said in a statement. “We are in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services and are releasing security updates today to protect Windows customers against vulnerabilities affecting supported hardware chips from AMD, ARM, and Intel. We have not received any information to indicate that these vulnerabilities had been used to attack our customers.”
Linux developers have already released a fix, apparently based on a paper recommending deep changes to operating systems known as KAISER, released earlier this year by researchers at the Graz University of Technology.
Apple released a statement Thursday confirming that “all Mac systems and iOS devices are affected,” though the Apple Watch is not. “Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown,” the company said. “In the coming days we plan to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre. We continue to develop and test further mitigations for these issues and will release them in upcoming updates of iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.”
Amazon, which offers cloud services on shared server setups, says that it will take steps to resolve the issue soon as well. “This is a vulnerability that has existed for more than 20 years in modern processor architectures like Intel, AMD, and ARM across servers, desktops, and mobile devices,” the company said in a statement. “All but a small single-digit percentage of instances across the Amazon EC2 fleet are already protected. The remaining ones will be completed in the next several hours.”
Google, which offers similar cloud services, pointed WIRED to a chart of Meltdown and Spectre’s effects on its services, which states that the security issue has been resolved in all of the company’s infrastructure.
Those operating system patches that fix the Intel flaw may come at a performance cost: Better isolating the kernel memory from unprivileged memory could create a significant slowdowns for certain processes.
According to an analysis by the Register, which was also the first to report on the Intel flaw, those delays could be as much as 30 percent in some cases, although some processes and newer processors are likely to experience less significant slowdowns. Intel, for its part, wrote in its statement that “performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.”
Until the patches for Meltdown and Spectre roll out more widely, it’s not clear just what the speed cost of neutering those attacks may turn out to be. But even if the updates result in a performance hit, it is a worthwhile safeguard: Better to put the brakes on your processor, perhaps, than allow it to spill your computer’s most sensitive secrets.
Spectre, is not likely to be fully fixed any time soon. The fact is that the practice that leads to this attack being possible is so hard-wired into processors that the researchers couldn’t find any way to totally avoid it. They list a few suggestions, but conclude:
While the stop-gap countermeasures may help limit practical exploits in the short term, there is currently no way to know whether a particular code construction is, or is not, safe across today’s processors – much less future designs.
