US-CERT Discloses Security Flaw In 64-Bit Intel Chips 181
Fnord666 writes "The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has disclosed a flaw in Intel chips that could allow hackers to gain control of Windows and other operating systems, security experts say. The flaw was disclosed the vulnerability in a security advisory released this week. Hackers could exploit the flaw to execute malicious code with kernel privileges, said a report in the Bitdefender blog. 'Some 64-bit operating systems and virtualization software running on Intel CPU hardware are vulnerable to a local privilege escalation attack,' the US-CERT advisory says. 'The vulnerability may be exploited for local privilege escalation or a guest-to-host virtual machine escape.'" According to the article, exposed OSes include "Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, 64-bit versions of FreeBSD and NetBSD, as well as systems that include the Xen hypervisor."
Re:Besides MS and Intel... (Score:2, Insightful)
If I understood things correctly, Intel processors offer two ways of doing things, AMD just the one. The one that Intel borked is the one they offer to be compatable with AMD.
Since Apple don't need to worry about their software running correctly on AMD, they presumably used the other mechanism.
Re:What is the bug? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is arguable whether it is a CPU bug or an OS/hypervisor bug. The CPU should not run the fault code with privileges, but on the other hand the OS should prevent the fault code from being called in the first place.
I think it's only arguable inside Intel's reality-distortion field. The whole point of SYSCALL/SYSRET is to create a *fast* syscall path. Requiring extra code before *every* SYSRET in order to prevent it from overwriting arbitrary memory is pretty clearly a design flaw in Intel's specification, especially since (as TFA notes) that specification was intended to be compatible with AMD's specification.