Skip to content
Commit 8cb861e9 authored by Pawan Gupta's avatar Pawan Gupta Committed by Borislav Petkov
Browse files

x86/speculation/mmio: Add mitigation for Processor MMIO Stale Data



Processor MMIO Stale Data is a class of vulnerabilities that may
expose data after an MMIO operation. For details please refer to
Documentation/admin-guide/hw-vuln/processor_mmio_stale_data.rst.

These vulnerabilities are broadly categorized as:

Device Register Partial Write (DRPW):
  Some endpoint MMIO registers incorrectly handle writes that are
  smaller than the register size. Instead of aborting the write or only
  copying the correct subset of bytes (for example, 2 bytes for a 2-byte
  write), more bytes than specified by the write transaction may be
  written to the register. On some processors, this may expose stale
  data from the fill buffers of the core that created the write
  transaction.

Shared Buffers Data Sampling (SBDS):
  After propagators may have moved data around the uncore and copied
  stale data into client core fill buffers, processors affected by MFBDS
  can leak data from the fill buffer.

Shared Buffers Data Read (SBDR):
  It is similar to Shared Buffer Data Sampling (SBDS) except that the
  data is directly read into the architectural software-visible state.

An attacker can use these vulnerabilities to extract data from CPU fill
buffers using MDS and TAA methods. Mitigate it by clearing the CPU fill
buffers using the VERW instruction before returning to a user or a
guest.

On CPUs not affected by MDS and TAA, user application cannot sample data
from CPU fill buffers using MDS or TAA. A guest with MMIO access can
still use DRPW or SBDR to extract data architecturally. Mitigate it with
VERW instruction to clear fill buffers before VMENTER for MMIO capable
guests.

Add a kernel parameter mmio_stale_data={off|full|full,nosmt} to control
the mitigation.

Signed-off-by: default avatarPawan Gupta <pawan.kumar.gupta@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarBorislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
parent f52ea6c2
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment