ASA-2019-00004 – Linux: Page cache side channel attacks through mincore() system call


Allele Security Alert

ASA-2019-00004

Identifier(s)

ASA-2019-00004, CVE-2019-5489

Title

Page cache side channel attacks through mincore() system call

Vendor(s)

Linux foundation

Product(s)

Linux

Affected version(s)

All Linux versions released since 2.3.5

Fixed version(s)

Linux v5.0-rc1

Proof of concept

Unknown

Description

A flaw was found in the ability to misuse cache data to manipulate or understand application state to reveal algorithmic secrets that are intended to be privileged information.

Technical details

Unknown

Credits

Daniel Gruss, Erik Kraft, Trishita Tiwari, Michael Schwarz, Ari Trachtenberg, Jason Hennessey, Alex Ionescu and Anders Fogh

Reference(s)

New pagecache based sidechannel attack published
https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2019/q1/27

CVE-2019-5489 – Red Hat Customer Portal
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2019-5489

Bug 1120843 – (CVE-2019-5489) VUL-0: CVE-2019-5489: kernel-source: new pagecache side-channel attack
https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1120843

Page Cache Attacks
https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01161

Change mincore() to count “mapped” pages rather than “cached” pages
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/574823bfab82d9d8fa47f422778043fbb4b4f50e

Change mincore() to count “mapped” pages rather than “cached” pages
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=574823bfab82d9d8fa47f422778043fbb4b4f50e

CVE-2019-5489
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-5489

CVE-2019-5489
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-5489

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Last modified: January 8, 2019

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