commit 24f7fc83b9 upstream
Contemporary high performance processors use a common industry-wide
optimization known as "Speculative Store Bypass" in which loads from
addresses to which a recent store has occurred may (speculatively) see an
older value. Intel refers to this feature as "Memory Disambiguation" which
is part of their "Smart Memory Access" capability.
Memory Disambiguation can expose a cache side-channel attack against such
speculatively read values. An attacker can create exploit code that allows
them to read memory outside of a sandbox environment (for example,
malicious JavaScript in a web page), or to perform more complex attacks
against code running within the same privilege level, e.g. via the stack.
As a first step to mitigate against such attacks, provide two boot command
line control knobs:
nospec_store_bypass_disable
spec_store_bypass_disable=[off,auto,on]
By default affected x86 processors will power on with Speculative
Store Bypass enabled. Hence the provided kernel parameters are written
from the point of view of whether to enable a mitigation or not.
The parameters are as follows:
- auto - Kernel detects whether your CPU model contains an implementation
of Speculative Store Bypass and picks the most appropriate
mitigation.
- on - disable Speculative Store Bypass
- off - enable Speculative Store Bypass
[ tglx: Reordered the checks so that the whole evaluation is not done
when the CPU does not support RDS ]
Signed-off-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
65f747a6b1