Security News > 2021 > March > Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Can Be Exploited to Bypass Spectre Mitigations
Recent Linux kernel updates include patches for a couple of vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to bypass mitigations designed to protect devices against Spectre attacks.
Symantec reported on Monday that Piotr Krysiuk, a member of its Threat Hunter team, has identified two new vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel that can be exploited to bypass mitigations for the Spectre vulnerabilities.
This process should also provide protection against Spectre attacks, but the vulnerabilities discovered by the Symantec researcher can be exploited to bypass this protection, allowing a local attacker to obtain potentially sensitive data from the device's memory.
"The most likely scenario where these vulnerabilities could be exploited is in a situation where multiple users have access to a single affected computer - as could be the case in workplace situations etc. In this scenario, any of the unprivileged users could abuse one of the identified vulnerabilities to extract contents of the kernel memory to locate secrets from other users," Symantec explained in a blog post.
The cybersecurity firm added, "The bugs could also potentially be exploited if a malicious actor was able to gain access to an exploitable machine via a prior step - such as downloading malware onto the machine to achieve remote access - this could then allow them to exploit these vulnerabilities to gain access to all user profiles on the machine."
These vulnerabilities have been patched with kernel updates released in March and they have already been deployed by several major Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu and Red Hat.