ALAS2-2018-962

Related Vulnerabilities: CVE-2017-5715  

Speculative execution branch target injectionAn industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). There are three primary variants of the issue which differ in the way the speculative execution can be exploited. Variant CVE-2017-5715 triggers the speculative execution by utilizing branch target injection. It relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact that memory accesses may cause allocation into the microprocessor's data cache even for speculatively executed instructions that never actually commit (retire). As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this flaw to cross the syscall and guest/host boundaries and read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks.(CVE-2017-5715)

ALAS2-2018-962


Amazon Linux 2 Security Advisory: ALAS-2018-962
Advisory Release Date: 2018-02-20 21:46 Pacific
Advisory Updated Date: 2018-02-21 21:23 Pacific
Severity: Important
References: CVE-2017-5715 

Issue Overview:

Speculative execution branch target injection
An industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). There are three primary variants of the issue which differ in the way the speculative execution can be exploited. Variant CVE-2017-5715 triggers the speculative execution by utilizing branch target injection. It relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact that memory accesses may cause allocation into the microprocessor's data cache even for speculatively executed instructions that never actually commit (retire). As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this flaw to cross the syscall and guest/host boundaries and read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks.(CVE-2017-5715)


Affected Packages:

linux-firmware


Issue Correction:
Run yum update linux-firmware to update your system.

New Packages:
noarch:
    linux-firmware-20170606-58.gitc990aae.amzn2.noarch
    iwl100-firmware-39.31.5.1-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl105-firmware-18.168.6.1-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl135-firmware-18.168.6.1-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl1000-firmware-39.31.5.1-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl2000-firmware-18.168.6.1-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl2030-firmware-18.168.6.1-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl3160-firmware-22.0.7.0-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl3945-firmware-15.32.2.9-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl4965-firmware-228.61.2.24-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl5000-firmware-8.83.5.1_1-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl5150-firmware-8.24.2.2-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl6000-firmware-9.221.4.1-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl6000g2a-firmware-17.168.5.3-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl6000g2b-firmware-17.168.5.2-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl6050-firmware-41.28.5.1-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl7260-firmware-22.0.7.0-58.amzn2.noarch
    iwl7265-firmware-22.0.7.0-58.amzn2.noarch

src:
    linux-firmware-20170606-58.gitc990aae.amzn2.src