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.

CVE-2023-1998 (GCVE-0-2023-1998)
Vulnerability from cvelistv5
Published
2023-04-21 14:51
Modified
2025-02-13 16:39
Severity ?
5.6 (Medium) - CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N
CWE
  • CWE-1303 - Non-Transparent Sharing of Microarchitectural Resources
Summary
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 still left the victim process exposed to attacks in some cases even after enabling the spectre-BTI mitigation with prctl. The same behavior can be observed on a bare-metal machine when forcing the mitigation to IBRS on boot command line. This happened because when plain IBRS was enabled (not enhanced IBRS), the kernel had some logic that determined that STIBP was not needed. The IBRS bit implicitly protects against cross-thread branch target injection. However, with legacy IBRS, the IBRS bit was cleared on returning to userspace, due to performance reasons, which disabled the implicit STIBP and left userspace threads vulnerable to cross-thread branch target injection against which STIBP protects.
References
Impacted products
Vendor Product Version
Linux Linux Kernel Version: 0   < 6.3
 Create a notification for this product.
Show details on NVD website

To clipboard 

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CVE-2023-38575 (GCVE-0-2023-38575)
Vulnerability from cvelistv5
Published
2024-03-14 16:45
Modified
2025-02-13 17:01
Severity ?
5.5 (Medium) - CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CWE
  • information disclosure
  • CWE-1303 - Non-Transparent Sharing of Microarchitectural Resources
Summary
Non-transparent sharing of return predictor targets between contexts in some Intel(R) Processors may allow an authorized user to potentially enable information disclosure via local access.
References
Impacted products
Vendor Product Version
n/a Intel(R) Processors Version: some Intel(R) Processors
Show details on NVD website

To clipboard 

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CVE-2023-40540 (GCVE-0-2023-40540)
Vulnerability from cvelistv5
Published
2023-11-14 19:05
Modified
2024-08-30 15:16
Severity ?
4.1 (Medium) - CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CWE
  • information disclosure
  • CWE-1303 - Non-Transparent Sharing of Microarchitectural Resources
Summary
Non-Transparent Sharing of Microarchitectural Resources in some Intel(R) NUC BIOS firmware may allow a privileged user to potentially enable information disclosure via local access.
References
Impacted products
Vendor Product Version
n/a Intel(R) NUC BIOS firmware Version: some Intel(R) NUC BIOS firmware
Show details on NVD website

To clipboard 

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Mitigation

Phase: Architecture and Design

Description:

  • 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.
Mitigation

Phase: Requirements

Description:

  • 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.
CAPEC-663: Exploitation of Transient Instruction Execution

An adversary exploits a hardware design flaw in a CPU implementation of transient instruction execution to expose sensitive data and bypass/subvert access control over restricted resources. Typically, the adversary conducts a covert channel attack to target non-discarded microarchitectural changes caused by transient executions such as speculative execution, branch prediction, instruction pipelining, and/or out-of-order execution. The transient execution results in a series of instructions (gadgets) which construct covert channel and access/transfer the secret data.

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