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Old 13th June 2012
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Default Intel CPUs affected by VM privilege escalation exploit

From http://h-online.com/-1616866

Quote:
A security vulnerability in the virtualisation software built into Intel's hardware allows an attacker to execute code in Ring 0 of the CPU. The problem affects 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the Xen hypervisor.
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Old 13th June 2012
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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@J65nko, I know you are trying to keep our small community informed, and I appreciate the effort.

Please, check multiple sources -- and then focus on applicability to the BSD operating systems -- before deciding to post these sorts of news links.
When I post a response in your news threads it is sometimes because I feel either your excerpt, or, the linked article itself are either incomplete or not in a useful context for BSD users.
This thread is a case in point.

The vulnerability also affects NetBSD.

I have not seen an official notification or response listed, but it has been posted on OpenBSD's misc@ that this does not affect OpenBSD.
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Old 13th June 2012
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Hurray for OpenBSD!
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Old 13th June 2012
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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Old 14th June 2012
comet--berkeley comet--berkeley is offline
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Default Security Intel CPUs affected by VM privilege escalation exploit

Quote:
Security Intel CPUs affected by VM privilege escalation exploit
The keyword here being "VM".

All the Linux vulnerabilities seem to require XeN for the bug to appear:

http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/byvendor...&SearchOrder=4

A virtual machine is no more secure than the underlying host operating system.

I wish a group with the mind-set of OpenBSD (or more stringent) would create a decent open source virtual machine environment...
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Old 14th June 2012
thirdm thirdm is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by comet--berkeley View Post
The keyword here being "VM".

All the Linux vulnerabilities seem to require XeN for the bug to appear:
It doesn't actually require Xen in general, if I'm reading the link below correctly:

http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2012/0...ge-escalation/

You'll note that Linux fixed their non-Xen version of the problem in 2006, but others apparently weren't paying close attention to what they were fixing and whether it affected them too:

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvenam...=CVE-2006-0744

"Linux kernel before 2.6.16.5 does not properly handle uncanonical return addresses on Intel EM64T CPUs, which reports an exception in the SYSRET instead of the next instruction, which causes the kernel exception handler to run on the user stack with the wrong GS."

Also interesting about the Xen blog description is that the motivation for the sysret instruction (and a similar one from Intel that hasn't become the defacto standard) was performance. And I find it interesting how you have the two chip vendors not agreeing on a single solution and then implementing sysret in slightly different ways causing more complexity.

So I wonder, did Linux fix it by using iretq instead or by some other means (one of the Redhat advisories says something about guard pages)? You're implying that OpenBSD weighed sysret vs. iretq, figured sysret smelled funny, and passed on the performance gain -- i.e. you're saying it was something deliberate in the OpenBSD developers' approach that saved them. That sounds plausible, but is that how it happened or did they just get lucky?

FreeBSD's advisory doesn't mention Xen, so does that mean you can get privilege escalation with them on bare hardware?

Doesn't Amazon's EC2 service use Xen?
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Old 14th June 2012
thirdm thirdm is offline
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This is a better link: http://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/08...-emulation.txt
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Old 14th June 2012
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Quote:
...That sounds plausible, but is that how it happened or did they just get lucky?...
Good question. The developer who commented on OpenBSD's misc@ mailing list was guenther@; he has been directly involved in patches that address sysret control blocks, though I could find no specific mention of sysret management in CVS logs when looking through marc.info just now. That archive is incomplete, of course.
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Old 14th June 2012
gpatrick gpatrick is offline
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The article mentioned Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD, but sysret was also patched in Illumos 18 hours ago.
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Old 18th June 2012
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Quoting myself, for correction
Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
...I have not seen an official notification or response listed, but it has been posted on OpenBSD's misc@ that this does not affect OpenBSD.
Per this @misc post today Intel platforms running OpenBSD prior to 5.0-release are affected.
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