CVE-2017-5715

Public on 2018-01-03
Modified on 2018-02-21
Description
An industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). There are three primary variants of the issue which differ in the way the speculative execution can be exploited. Variant CVE-2017-5715 triggers the speculative execution by utilizing branch target injection. It relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code as well as the fact that memory accesses may cause allocation into the microprocessor's data cache even for speculatively executed instructions that never actually commit (retire). As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this flaw to cross the syscall and guest/host boundaries and read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks.
Severity
Important severity
Important
CVSS v3 Base Score
5.6
See breakdown

Affected Packages

Platform Package Release Date Advisory Status
Amazon Linux 1 kernel 2018-01-03 ALAS-2018-939 Fixed
Amazon Linux 2 - Core kernel 2018-01-11 ALAS2-2018-939 Fixed
Amazon Linux 2 - Core libvirt 2018-02-07 ALAS2-2018-952 Fixed
Amazon Linux 2 - Core linux-firmware 2018-02-20 ALAS2-2018-962 Fixed
Amazon Linux 2 - Core microcode_ctl 2018-02-07 ALAS2-2018-953 Fixed
Amazon Linux 1 qemu-kvm 2018-01-12 ALAS-2018-942 Fixed
Amazon Linux 2 - Core qemu-kvm 2018-02-07 ALAS2-2018-942 Fixed

CVSS Scores

Score Type Score Vector
Amazon Linux CVSSv3 5.6 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N
NVD CVSSv2 1.9 AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
NVD CVSSv3 5.6 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N