SUMMARY Bitdefender senior researchers Dan Horea Luțaș and Andrei Vlad Luțaș recently uncovered a new speculative-execution vulnerability and demonstrated how it can be exploited via a side-channel style attack, dubbed SWAPGS Attack. FURTHER READING • https://labs.bitdefender.com/2019/08/bypassing-kpti-using-the-speculative-behavior-of-the-swapgs-instruction/ • https://access.redhat.com/articles/4329821 • https://www.andreafortuna.org/2019/08/07/cve-2019-1125-swapgs-attack-a-new-speculative-execution-side-channel-attack/ SCOPE Affects Intel processors from Ivy Bridge onwards. AMD have issued a statement claiming that they are not affected because "AMD products are designed not to speculate on the new GS value following a speculative SWAPGS". MITIGATION Fixed by the following kernel releases: • 5.2.7 • 4.19.65 • 4.14.137
See also https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=18ec54f.