CVE-2024-50102

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

x86: fix user address masking non-canonical speculation issue

It turns out that AMD has a Meltdown Lite(tm) issue with non-canonical accesses in kernel space. And so using just the high bit to decide whether an access is in user space or kernel space ends up with the good old leak speculative data if you have the right gadget using the result:

CVE-2020-12965 “Transient Execution of Non-Canonical Accesses“

Now, the kernel surrounds the access with a STAC/CLAC pair, and those instructions end up serializing execution on older Zen architectures, which closes the speculation window.

But that was true only up until Zen 5, which renames the AC bit [1]. That improves performance of STAC/CLAC a lot, but also means that the speculation window is now open.

Note that this affects not just the new address masking, but also the regular valid_user_address() check used by access_ok(), and the asm version of the sign bit check in the get_user() helpers.

It does not affect put_user() or clear_user() variants, since theres no speculative result to be used in a gadget for those operations.

Weakness

The product behaves differently or sends different responses under different circumstances in a way that is observable to an unauthorized actor, which exposes security-relevant information about the state of the product, such as whether a particular operation was successful or not.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
• Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.
• Ensure that error messages only contain minimal details that are useful to the intended audience and no one else. The messages need to strike the balance between being too cryptic (which can confuse users) or being too detailed (which may reveal more than intended). The messages should not reveal the methods that were used to determine the error. Attackers can use detailed information to refine or optimize their original attack, thereby increasing their chances of success.
• If errors must be captured in some detail, record them in log messages, but consider what could occur if the log messages can be viewed by attackers. Highly sensitive information such as passwords should never be saved to log files.
• Avoid inconsistent messaging that might accidentally tip off an attacker about internal state, such as whether a user account exists or not.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/189.html

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/291313693677a345d4f50aae3c68e28b469f601e
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/86e6b1547b3d013bc392adf775b89318441403c2