The unusual vulnerability may have allowed for escalation of privilege, denial of service or info disclosure assaults.
Intel has printed a repair for a possible vulnerability that affected some Intel processors. The safety flaw, named Reptar, causes “very unusual conduct,” mentioned Google’s Tavis Ormandy, who is without doubt one of the researchers who found the bug.
No assaults have been reported utilizing the Reptar bug. Nevertheless, Ormandy famous the bug is probably wide-reaching and never but absolutely understood: “… we merely don’t know if we will management the corruption exactly sufficient to attain privilege escalation,” he wrote on his web site in regards to the Reptar vulnerability. “I believe that it’s potential, however we don’t have any method to debug μop (micro) execution!”
Bounce to:
What’s the Reptar bug?
Put very merely, Reptar breaks some primary guidelines of how processors normally work and will result in a system crash, escalation of privilege assaults, denial of service assaults or undesirable info disclosure.
The issue was with the prefixes used to change directions when writing x86 meeting. The prefix rex may work together in surprising methods on machines with a function referred to as quick quick repeat transfer; this function was first launched in Intel’s Ice Lake structure. Ormandy has a way more technical rationalization.
SEE: Google Cloud suggested safety groups ought to preserve a watch out for all kinds of assaults in 2024 (TechRepublic)
The “unusual conduct” Ormandy and his Google colleagues discovered included branches to surprising places, unconditional branches being ignored and inaccurate recordings of the instruction pointer in xsave or name directions. Ormandy additionally discovered {that a} debugger returned unattainable states when the researchers have been attempting to look into the issue.
MITRE tracks this bug as CVE-2023-23583.
Intel patched quite a lot of processors
On Nov. 14, Intel addressed the potential flaw in quite a lot of processors. the next processors. Intel mitigated the flaw in:
- twelfth Technology Intel Core Processors.
- 4th Technology Intel Xeon Processors.
- thirteenth Technology Intel Core Processors.
Intel launched a microcode replace for:
- tenth Technology Intel Core Processors.
- third Technology Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Household processors.
- The Intel Xeon D Processor.
- The eleventh Technology Intel Core Processor Household on desktop and cell.
- The Intel Server Processor.
Intel was conscious of the potential bug earlier this yr
Intel had been conscious of this bug beforehand to the Google researchers’ work on it and was transferring the bug by way of Intel’s standardized Intel Platform Replace course of. Intel had scheduled a repair for March, ArsTechnica discovered, however the Google crew’s discovery of the potential escalation of privileges made it a better precedence.
An Intel assertion supplied to TechRepublic by electronic mail mentioned, “On the request of shoppers, together with OEMs and CSPs, this course of (the Intel Platform Replace course of) usually features a validation, integration and deployment window after Intel deems the patch meets manufacturing high quality, and helps be certain that mitigations can be found to all clients on all supported Intel platforms when the problem is publicly disclosed.”
How you can defend in opposition to the Reptar vulnerability
Intel recommends that organizations utilizing the affected processors replace to the newest variations. System directors ought to make certain their BIOS, system OS and drivers are updated. System admins can go to Intel’s microcode repository to obtain the microcode and may contact Intel or their working system vendor for extra info.
This potential vulnerability is an effective reminder to maintain all software program and {hardware} updated.
