Since exploiting many of these issues requires a malicious app to be loaded on your Mac or iOS device, we recommend downloading software only from trusted sources such as the App Store.Īpple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown. All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at the time of this writing. These issues apply to all modern processors and affect nearly all computing devices and operating systems. Security researchers have recently uncovered security issues known by two names, Meltdown and Spectre. The research "further underscores the need for everyone to adhere to security best practices," Intel executive vice president of product assurance and security Leslie Culbertson wrote in a blog post Tuesday.About speculative execution vulnerabilities in ARM-based and Intel CPUsĪpple has released security updates for macOS Sierra and El Capitan with mitigations for Meltdown.Īpple has released updates for iOS, macOS High Sierra, and Safari on Sierra and El Capitan to help defend against Spectre.Īpple Watch is unaffected by both Meltdown and Spectre. The researchers and Intel both highly recommend that individuals and enterprises keep their devices up to date, and note that major cloud companies are already working on mitigating Foreshadow. But what does it mean? It's good for our set of tricks, but we cannot attest to something else." "We ran our code with the mitigations in place, and the attack didn’t work. "It's a very hard question," Genkin says. The researchers themselves haven't empirically demonstrated these possible attacks, as they did with SGX, but Intel says that a big portion of its mitigation efforts are targeting toward ensuring that cloud providers and their users have the mitigations and guidance they need to fully implement protections.Īnd though the researchers applaud Intel's extensive efforts, they note that they can't know for sure that the defenses mitigate every possible permutation of a Foreshadow attack. There's even some evidence that Foreshadow could be used to attack a computer's fundamental coordinating layers that hold up the operating system, like the kernel and System Management Mode. Similarly, Foreshadow attacks may threaten "hypervisors," which underly and monitor virtual machines. That could pose a serious risk to cloud companies, which use VMs to let customers share their infrastructure. For example, Foreshadow could potentially erode the isolation between virtual machines-distinct computing environments that can all share the same hardware. Secure enclaves act as a sort of computer within a computer, so it stands to reason that Foreshadow attacks actually apply to other features with similar traits. One reason Intel needs to patch things quickly and thoroughly is that the company discovered that even more processor systems are susceptible to Foreshadow-type attacks than just SGX. "As soon as the attestation key sees the light of day, then everything kind of crumbles." The amount of information we actually got out-that took us by surprise." "We thought speculative execution could get some information from SGX, but we weren’t sure how much. "There were certain aspects that were surprising and certain aspects that weren't," says microarchitecture security researcher Yuval Yarom, a member of the team that will present its findings at the Usenix security conference in Baltimore on Thursday. But a group of researchers, hailing from five academic institutions around the world, found that although SGX can mostly repel Spectre and Meltdown attacks, a related attack can bypass its defenses. The secure enclave creates a safe haven for sensitive data, even if malware or another malady compromises the main computer. These are regions of a chip that are cordoned off to run code that the computer's operating system can't access or change. Intel's Software Guard Extensions feature, known as SGX, allows programs to establish so-called secure enclaves on Intel processors. Now, a team of researchers has found a Spectre-like vulnerability that specifically undermines the most secure element of recent Intel chips-and potentially has even broader implications. In cybersecurity circles, this has been the year of Spectre and Meltdown, not only because the chip vulnerabilities-first publicly disclosed in January-were so widespread that they're still being cleaned up, but because they've given rise to the discovery of many related flaws.
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