CVE-2017-5754

Public on 2018-01-03
Modified on 2018-01-16
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-2017-5754 relies on the fact that, on impacted microprocessors, during speculative execution of instruction permission faults, exception generation triggered by a faulting access is suppressed until the retirement of the whole instruction block. In a combination with the fact that memory accesses may populate the cache even when the block is being dropped and never committed (executed), an unprivileged local attacker could use this flaw to read privileged (kernel space) memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks. Note: CVE-2017-5754 affects Intel x86-64 microprocessors. AMD x86-64 microprocessors are not affected by this issue.
Severity
Important severity
Important
CVSS v3 Base Score
5.5
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

CVSS Scores

Score Type Score Vector
Amazon Linux CVSSv3 5.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
NVD CVSSv2 4.7 AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:C/I:N/A:N
NVD CVSSv3 5.6 CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N