The bug allows attackers to swipe data from a CPU’s registers. […] the exploit doesn’t require physical hardware access and can be triggered by loading JavaScript on a malicious website.
The bug allows attackers to swipe data from a CPU’s registers. […] the exploit doesn’t require physical hardware access and can be triggered by loading JavaScript on a malicious website.
Good writeup, but…
This attack doesn’t target passwords “typed by users”, but AES binary passwords, which are either 128 or 256 bit long. Particularly it targets password used very often, like disk encryption passwords (both on end-user and server machines) or RAM encryption passwords (mostly used for securing VMs on servers).
It just happens that those same SIMD registers, are used to speed up encryption/decryption operations, so there is a very high chance of whatever data a malicious program manages to extract, to be either part of the key (about 30% chance), part of some random data either encrypted or decrypted (about 30% each), or a small chance of something else.
Given that the attack can be executed millions of times per second, even with a low chance of hitting the right timing, the “beauty” of these attacks is that most of the time you will get the same data, which will be either detectable as “unsuccessful”, or part of the disk/RAM encryption password. Simply running them for long enough, then looking at which data repeated the most, is going to give you the passwords to the most often running encryption processes.
The difference in impact to servers vs. user machines, is only because a server running the same software 24/7 is more likely to return meaningful data, than a user opening and closing random browser tabs, playing games, or turning the whole thing off.
Still, if the user has disk encryption enabled, that key is likely to be extracted even with a piece of JavaScript that fails the attack most of the time.
I suppose that is a good point. look for repeating chunks of data to get hardware encryption keys. However, the main point I want to stress remains that a javascript version is yet to be proven. Cloudflare edited their original statement yesterday from “The attack can even be carried out remotely through JavaScript on a website, meaning that the attacker need not have physical access to the computer or server.” to today “While there might be a possibility to execute this attack via the browser on the remote machine it hasn’t been yet demonstrated.” https://blog.cloudflare.com/zenbleed-vulnerability/
This was the main piece of misinformation I wanted to dispel. It is still up in the air whether regular people with home computers need to be panicking. Thank you for also pointing out that this isn’t primarily targeting passwords “typed by users.”
The JavaScript vector is a reasonable extrapolation based on how similar attacks like Meltdown, Spectre, or Heartbleed, eventually got their JavaScript exploits. There may not be one yet, but there’s likely to be one at some point.
That one’s easy: no, they don’t.
Even if an attacker were to get the disk encryption key from a regular user through some malicious JavaScript, the chances of them being able to actually exploit it, are slim to none. They’d still need some extra way to use that key, which would require a separate exploit, or physical access.
If it were a company computer, or the user got personally targeted (espionage, trade secrets, law enforcement, etc.)… then maybe worry a bit.
Hosting providers with shared servers, need to panic a lot. Anyone running a public server, be it at a provider or at home, should also panic a bit.
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Tailscale… accessible from where? It would likely require an attacker to jump from the endpoint to a vulnerable application (or SSH) which, while possible, seems improbable. Maybe over time as the exploit gets packaged in more suites, or if targeted personally.
On the VPS, check cpuinfo to see if it’s one of the vulnerable ones. If it is, then I’d either ask them directly, avoid that kind of VPS for a while, or use it for non-sensitive stuff until it gets a fix.
ARM… will have its day. Speculative branching is too tempting to ignore, and too difficult to implement flawlessly. Just give them time 😉
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