CVE-2024-50102 - Observable Discrepancy

Severity

55%

Complexity

18%

Confidentiality

60%

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 there's no speculative result to be used in a gadget for those operations.

CVSS 3.1 Base Score 5.5. CVSS Attack Vector: local. CVSS Attack Complexity: low. CVSS Vector: (CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N).

Demo Examples

Observable Discrepancy

CWE-203

The following code checks validity of the supplied username and password and notifies the user of a successful or failed login.


               
}
}
print "Login Successful";
print "Login Failed - incorrect password";
print "Login Failed - unknown username";

In the above code, there are different messages for when an incorrect username is supplied, versus when the username is correct but the password is wrong. This difference enables a potential attacker to understand the state of the login function, and could allow an attacker to discover a valid username by trying different values until the incorrect password message is returned. In essence, this makes it easier for an attacker to obtain half of the necessary authentication credentials.

While this type of information may be helpful to a user, it is also useful to a potential attacker. In the above example, the message for both failed cases should be the same, such as:


               
"Login Failed - incorrect username or password"

Observable Discrepancy

CWE-203

Non-uniform processing time causes timing channel.

Suppose a hardware IP for implementing an encryption routine works fine per se, but the time taken to output the result of the encryption routine depends on a certain relationship between the input plaintext and the key (e.g., suppose, if the plaintext is similar to the key, it would run very fast).

In the example above, an attacker can vary the inputs and, depending on the seen differences between processing times (different plaintexts take different time), can infer certain information about the key.

If the actual processing time was different for different plaintexts, artificial delays can be introduced to ensured all plaintexts take equal time to execute, even though the timing was internally different.

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