commit 553a5c03e90a6087e88f8ff878335ef0621536fb upstream
The Gather Data Sampling (GDS) vulnerability allows malicious software
to infer stale data previously stored in vector registers. This may
include sensitive data such as cryptographic keys. GDS is mitigated in
microcode, and systems with up-to-date microcode are protected by
default. However, any affected system that is running with older
microcode will still be vulnerable to GDS attacks.
Since the gather instructions used by the attacker are part of the
AVX2 and AVX512 extensions, disabling these extensions prevents gather
instructions from being executed, thereby mitigating the system from
GDS. Disabling AVX2 is sufficient, but we don't have the granularity
to do this. The XCR0[2] disables AVX, with no option to just disable
AVX2.
Add a kernel parameter gather_data_sampling=force that will enable the
microcode mitigation if available, otherwise it will disable AVX on
affected systems.
This option will be ignored if cmdline mitigations=off.
This is a *big* hammer. It is known to break buggy userspace that
uses incomplete, buggy AVX enumeration. Unfortunately, such userspace
does exist in the wild:
https://www.mail-archive.com/bug-coreutils@gnu.org/msg33046.html
[ dhansen: add some more ominous warnings about disabling AVX ]
Signed-off-by: Daniel Sneddon <daniel.sneddon@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Sneddon <daniel.sneddon@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
commit 8974eb588283b7d44a7c91fa09fcbaf380339f3a upstream
Gather Data Sampling (GDS) is a hardware vulnerability which allows
unprivileged speculative access to data which was previously stored in
vector registers.
Intel processors that support AVX2 and AVX512 have gather instructions
that fetch non-contiguous data elements from memory. On vulnerable
hardware, when a gather instruction is transiently executed and
encounters a fault, stale data from architectural or internal vector
registers may get transiently stored to the destination vector
register allowing an attacker to infer the stale data using typical
side channel techniques like cache timing attacks.
This mitigation is different from many earlier ones for two reasons.
First, it is enabled by default and a bit must be set to *DISABLE* it.
This is the opposite of normal mitigation polarity. This means GDS can
be mitigated simply by updating microcode and leaving the new control
bit alone.
Second, GDS has a "lock" bit. This lock bit is there because the
mitigation affects the hardware security features KeyLocker and SGX.
It needs to be enabled and *STAY* enabled for these features to be
mitigated against GDS.
The mitigation is enabled in the microcode by default. Disable it by
setting gather_data_sampling=off or by disabling all mitigations with
mitigations=off. The mitigation status can be checked by reading:
/sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/gather_data_sampling
Signed-off-by: Daniel Sneddon <daniel.sneddon@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Sneddon <daniel.sneddon@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
