Security Vulnerability: Speculative Dereferencing of Registers

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12

Situation

Security researchers have published a paper, where they reviewed and expanded on existing research on CPU speculative side-channel attacks and corrected various assumptions by previous papers, and also showing some additional methods for side channels.

The resulting impact of the newly found issues is similar to Spectre Variant 2, and might expose confidential data from privileged areas, like from the Linux kernel.

The published paper is named "It's not Prefetch: Speculative: Dereferencing of Registers" and has so far not received separate CVEs.

Resolution

Both SUSE and upstream developers are currently investigating the impact, and also work on any required mitigations.

This will be solved by software only mitigations.

Cause

Research paper on speculative research issues

Status

Security Alert

Disclaimer

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