Security News > 2021 > March > New Bugs Could Let Hackers Bypass Spectre Attack Mitigations On Linux Systems
Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed two new vulnerabilities in Linux-based operating systems that, if successfully exploited, could let attackers circumvent mitigations for speculative attacks such as Spectre and obtain sensitive information from kernel memory.
While CVE-2020-27170 can be abused to reveal content from any location within the kernel memory, CVE-2020-27171 can be used to retrieve data from a 4GB range of kernel memory.
First documented in January 2018, Spectre and Meltdown take advantage of flaws in modern processors to leak data that are currently processed on the computer, thereby allowing a bad actor to bypass boundaries enforced by the hardware between two programs to get hold of cryptographic keys.
The new vulnerabilities uncovered by Symantec aim to get around these mitigations in Linux by taking advantage of the kernel's support for extended Berkeley Packet Filters to extract the contents of the kernel memory.
"Unprivileged BPF programs running on affected systems could bypass the Spectre mitigations and execute speculatively out-of-bounds loads with no restrictions," Symantec said.
Specifically, the kernel was found to perform undesirable out-of-bounds speculation on pointer arithmetic, thus defeating fixes for Spectre and opening the door for side-channel attacks.
News URL
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheHackersNews/~3/ubnH9EGr4lY/new-bugs-could-let-hackers-bypass.html
Related news
- New Linux Malware ‘Auto-Color’ Grants Hackers Full Remote Access to Compromised Systems (source)
- Bybit Hack Traced to Safe{Wallet} Supply Chain Attack Exploited by North Korean Hackers (source)
- Hackers Exploit Paragon Partition Manager Driver Vulnerability in Ransomware Attacks (source)
- Hackers Exploit AWS Misconfigurations to Launch Phishing Attacks via SES and WorkMail (source)
- Defending against EDR bypass attacks (source)
- New ‘Rules File Backdoor’ Attack Lets Hackers Inject Malicious Code via AI Code Editors (source)
- TechRepublic EXCLUSIVE: New Ransomware Attacks are Getting More Personal as Hackers ‘Apply Psychological Pressure” (source)
- Critical flaw in Next.js lets hackers bypass authorization (source)
- Update VMware Tools for Windows Now: High-Severity Flaw Lets Hackers Bypass Authentication (source)
- A Taxonomy of Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks and Mitigations (source)
Related Vulnerability
| DATE | CVE | VULNERABILITY TITLE | RISK |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021-03-20 | CVE-2020-27170 | Information Exposure Through Discrepancy vulnerability in multiple products An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel before 5.11.8. | 4.7 |
| 2021-03-20 | CVE-2020-27171 | Off-by-one Error vulnerability in multiple products An issue was discovered in the Linux kernel before 5.11.8. | 6.0 |