Title: EGI SVG 'ADVISORY' [TLP:WHITE] HIGH risk L1TF - Speculative Execution
Side Channel vulnerabilities concerning Intel processors
CVE-2018-3620, CVE-2018-3646 [EGI-SVG-CVE-2018-3620]
Date: 2018-09-04
Updated:
Affected software and risk
==========================
HIGH risk L1TF Speculative Execution Side Channel vulnerabilities concerning
Intel processors
Package : Intel Processors
CVE ID : CVE-2018-3620, CVE-2018-3646
Intel has issued an advisory INTEL-SA-00161 [R 1], concerning Speculative
Execution side channel vulnerabilities concerning Intel processors known as the
'L1 Terminal Fault' (a.k.a. Foreshadow) [R 2].
RedHat has classed these as 'Important' [R 3], as they may allow an attacker to
read unauthorized data from physical memory, and has issued updates which
mitigate these vulnerabilities.
Actions required/recommended
============================
Sites should update their linux systems if they have not done so already (since
14th August when mitigation for this issue via the various linux operating
systems became available.) Sites should re-boot after
installation of patches.
Patches and re-boots are particularly important on machines where unprivileged
users may have access e.g. worker nodes (WNs) and user interfaces (UIs) and on
hypervisors.
Component installation information
==================================
For RedHat enterprise Linux see [R 4]
For Scientific Linux see [R 5]
For CentOS see [R 6]
For Ubuntu see [R 7]
For Debian see [R 8]
Mitigation
==========
Applying the updates mitigates these intel problems.
More information
================
In this latest kernel update RedHat also includes a mitigation for
CVE-2018-3693, known as "Speculative Bounds Checks Bypass with Store (BCBS)"
Further note that updating to the latest kernel and microcode/firmware also
remediates other vulnerabilities which were fixed in previous updates,
including CVE-2018-3639, known as "Speculative Store Bypass" (SSB) or "Spectre
Variant 4". But a full mitigation for that latter vulnerability requires also
updating other packages, including among others libvirt and qemu-kvm, see [R 9]
Note that the microcode as shipped by RHEL 7 is not vulnerable to CVE-2018-3615
(also listed in the Intel advisory [R 1]), while for example Debian Stretch and
Jessie (stable and old-stable) do have security patches [R 10].
SVG considers the likelihood of exploit of this vulnerability to be quite low,
but the impact could be very high and very difficult to trace.
SVG plans to put more information on the SVG wiki [R 11] alongside the Meltdown
and Spectre vulnerabilities.
TLP and URL
===========
** WHITE information - Unlimited distribution -
see https://go.egi.eu/tlp for distribution restrictions **
URL: https://advisories.egi.eu/Advisory-SVG-CVE-2018-3620
Minor updates may be made without re-distribution to the sites
Comments
========
Comments or questions should be sent to svg-rat at mailman.egi.eu
If you find or become aware of another vulnerability which is relevant to EGI
you may report it by e-mail to
report-vulnerability at egi.eu
the EGI Software Vulnerability Group will take a look according to the
procedure defined in [R 12]
Note that this has been updated and the latest version approved by the
Operations Management Board in November 2017
References
==========
[R 1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00161.html
[R 2] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/l1tf.html
[R 3] https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/L1TF
[R 4] https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2018-3620
[R 5] https://www.scientificlinux.org/
[R 6] https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/
[R 7] http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/2018/CVE-2018-3620.html
[R 8] https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2018-3620
[R 9] https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/ssbd
[R 10 ] https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2018-3615
[R 11] https://go.egi.eu/svg
[R 12] https://documents.egi.eu/public/ShowDocument?docid=3145
Credit
======
SVG was alerted to this vulnerability by Vincent Brillault who is a member of
SVG
Timeline
========
Yyyy-mm-dd [EGI-SVG-2018-CVE-2018-3620]
2018-08-14 SVG alerted to this issue by Vincent Brillault
2018-08-31 Advisory drafted
2018-09-04 Advisory sent to sites
Context
=======
This advisory has been prepared as part of the effort to fulfil EGI SVG's
purpose "To minimize the risk to the EGI infrastructure arising from software
vulnerabilities"
The risk is that assessed by the group, according to the EGI SVG issue handling
procedure [R 12] in the context of how the software is used in the EGI
infrastructure. It is the opinion of the group, we do not guarantee it to be
correct. The risk may also be higher or lower in other deployments depending on
how the software is used.
Others may re-use this information provided they:-
1) Respect the provided TLP classification
2) Credit the EGI https://www.egi.eu/ Software Vulnerability Group
On behalf of the EGI SVG,