Shipping in the second half of this year, the next generation of Xeon Scalable Processors (codenamed Cascade Lake) will contain hardware fixes for the Meltdown attack and certain variants of the Spectre attack. So, too, will a range of processors using the same 8th generation Core branding that some processors are already using.

The Spectre attack has two variants, numbered version 1 and version 2. Spectre version 1 attacks will need software fixes, and the nature of these attacks means that they may always need software fixes. Applications that try to build sandboxes—locked-down environments used for running potentially hostile code, such as JavaScript in the browser—will need to be examined and updated to provide robust protection against Spectre version 1.

This was due to the particularly invasive nature of the Meltdown fix: Microsoft found that certain antivirus products manipulated Windows' kernel memory in unsupported ways that would crash systems with the Meltdown fix applied. The registry entry was a way for antivirus software to positively affirm that it was compatible with the Meltdown fix; if that entry was absent, Windows assumed that incompatible antivirus software was installed and hence did not apply the security fix.

This put systems without any antivirus software at all in a strange position: they too lack the registry entries, so they'd be passed over for fixes, even though they don't, in fact, have any incompatible antivirus software.

Intel reports that it has developed a stable microcode update to address the Spectre flaw for its Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors in all their various variants.

The microcode updates help address Spectre variant 2 attacks. Spectre variant 2 attacks work by persuading a processor's branch predictor to make a specific bad prediction about which code will be executed. This bad prediction can then be used to infer the value of data stored in memory, which, in turn, gives an attacker information that they shouldn't otherwise have. The microcode update is designed to give operating systems greater control over the branch predictor, enabling them to prevent one process from influencing the predictions made in another process.

Intel's first microcode update, developed late last year, was included in system firmware updates for machines with Broadwell, Haswell, Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors. But users subsequently discovered that the update was causing systems to crash and reboot. Initially, only Broadwell and Haswell systems were confirmed to be affected, but further examination determined that Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake systems were rebooting, too.

In its annual SEC filing, Intel has revealed that it's facing 32 lawsuits over the Spectre and Meltdown attacks on its processors. While the Spectre problem is a near-universal issue faced by modern processors, the Meltdown attack is specific to processors from Intel and Apple, along with certain ARM designs that are coming to market shortly.

Per Intel's filing, 30 of the cases are proposed customer class-action suits from users claiming to be harmed by the flaws. While Meltdown has effective workarounds, they come with some performance cost. Workarounds for Spectre are more difficult and similarly can harm system performance.

The other two cases are securities lawsuits that claim that Intel made misleading public statements during the six-month period after the company was notified of the problems but before the attacks were made public.

Coming this summer, the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) portions of ATP will be available for these older operating systems, allowing their health and status to be managed through the cloud interface. This will be paired with either third-party antivirus for endpoint protection or Windows Defender/System Center Endpoint Protection.

This move shows the contradictory position Microsoft finds itself in. On the one hand, Microsoft wants enterprises to deploy and use ATP as it continues to build its cloud-based device management and monitoring software. On the other hand, Redmond wants those same companies to upgrade to Windows 10. This creates a tension: having ATP as a Windows 10 exclusive feature makes Windows 10 more attractive—Microsoft says that security is one of the major reasons enterprises cite for moving to the new operating system—but with many organizations still having Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 systems that they need to support, the inability to monitor those machines makes ATP less attractive.

As more and more websites offer access over encrypted HTTPS, Chrome will soon brand any site served up over plain, unencrypted HTTP as "Not secure." Chrome 68, due for release in July, will start sticking the "Not secure" label in the address bar, as a counterpart to the "Secure" label and padlock icon that HTTPS sites get.

Google says that 81 of the top 100 sites on the Web default to HTTPS and that 68 percent of Chrome traffic on Android and Windows uses HTTPS. As such, non-secure HTTP is becoming the exception, not the rule, justifying the explicit call-out. While HTTPS once required expensive certificates, projects such as Let's Encrypt have made it easy to add HTTPS to just about any site at zero cost.

The Spectre attacks work by persuading a processor's branch predictor to make a specific bad prediction. This bad prediction can then be used to infer the value of data stored in memory, which, in turn, gives an attacker information that they shouldn't otherwise have. The microcode update is designed to give operating systems greater control over the branch predictor, enabling them to prevent one process from influencing the predictions made in another process.

Intel's first microcode update, developed late last year, was included in system firmware updates for machines with Broadwell, Haswell, Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors. But users subsequently discovered that the update was causing systems to crash and reboot. Initially, only Broadwell and Haswell systems were confirmed to be affected, but further examination determined that Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake systems were rebooting, too.

Enlarge/ A closeup shot of an Intel Haswell die, with a pin for size reference. (credit: Intel)

Microsoft has released a new Windows patch to disable Intel's hardware-based mitigation for the Spectre attack due to bugs introduced by Intel's mitigation.

In the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks that use the speculative execution behavior of modern processors to leak sensitive information, Intel released a microcode update that offers operating systems additional controls over the processor's ability to predict branches. When paired with corresponding operating system changes, the extra controls can prevent the unwanted information disclosure.

Unfortunately, Intel discovered earlier this month that the microcode updates are causing machines to reboot. Initially this was confirmed to be the case for Haswell and Broadwell chips; Intel later confirmed that it also applied to Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Skylake and Kaby Lake parts. Intel's advice was to stop deploying the microcode. A week ago the company said that it had isolated the root cause of reboots, at least for Haswell and Broadwell processors, and that it would soon begin testing a new version.

Proving once again that Google Chrome extensions are the Achilles heel of what's arguably the Internet's most secure browser, a researcher has documented a malicious add-on that tricks users into installing it and then, he said, is nearly impossible for most to manually uninstall. It was available for download on Google servers until Wednesday, 19 days after it was privately reported to Google security officials, a researcher said.

Once installed, an app called "Tiempo en colombia en vivo" prevents users from accessing the list of installed Chrome extensions by redirecting requests to chrome://apps/?r=extensions instead of chrome://extensions/, the page that lists all installed extensions and provides an interface for temporarily disabling or uninstalling them. Malwarebytes researcher Pieter Arntz said he experimented with a variety of hacks—including disabling JavaScript in the browser, starting Chrome with all extensions disabled, and renaming the folder where extensions are stored—none of them worked. Removing the extension proved so difficult that he ultimately advised users to run the free version of Malwarebytes and let it automatically remove the add-on.

When Arntz installed the extension on a test machine, Chrome spontaneously clicked on dozens of YouTube videos, an indication that inflating the number of views was among the things it did. The researcher hasn't ruled out the possibility that the add-on did more malicious things because the amount of obfuscated JavaScript it contained made a comprehensive analysis too time consuming. The researcher provided additional details in a blog post published Thursday.

Applications, operating systems, and firmware all need to be updated to defeat Meltdown and protect against Spectre, two attacks that exploit features of high-performance processors to leak information and undermine system security. The computing industry has been scrambling to respond after news of the problem broke early a few days into the new year.

But that patching is proving problematic. The Meltdown protection is revealing bugs or otherwise undesirable behavior in various drivers, and Intel is currently recommending that people cease installing a microcode update it issued to help tackle the Spectre problem. This comes as researchers are digging into the papers describing the issues and getting closer to weaponizing the research to turn it into a practical attack. With the bad guys sure to be doing the same, real-world attacks using this research are sure to follow soon.

Back when initially releasing its Windows patch, Microsoft acknowledged incompatibilities with some anti-virus software. To receive the Meltdown and Spectre fixes, anti-virus software on Windows is required to create a special registry entry indicating that it's compatible. Without this entry, not only are these patches blocked, but so too are all future Windows patches. Most anti-virus vendors should now have compatible versions of their products, but users with stale anti-virus software—expired trials or end-of-lifed products—are at this point much better off removing the third-party software entirely and using the built-in protection in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

As the industry continues to grapple with the Meltdown and Spectre attacks, operating system and browser developers in particular are continuing to develop and test schemes to protect against the problems. Simultaneously, microcode updates to alter processor behavior are also starting to ship.

Since news of these attacks first broke, it has been clear that resolving them is going to have some performance impact. Meltdown was presumed to have a substantial impact, at least for some workloads, but Spectre was more of an unknown due to its greater complexity. With patches and microcode now available (at least for some systems), that impact is now starting to become clearer. The situation is, as we should expect with these twin attacks, complex.

To recap: modern high-performance processors perform what is called speculative execution. They will make assumptions about which way branches in the code are taken and speculatively compute results accordingly. If they guess correctly, they win some extra performance; if they guess wrong, they throw away their speculatively calculated results. This is meant to be transparent to programs, but it turns out that this speculation slightly changes the state of the processor. These small changes can be measured, disclosing information about the data and instructions that were used speculatively.

Since its inception, Skype has been notable for its secretive, proprietary algorithm. It's also long had a complicated relationship with encryption: encryption is used by the Skype protocol, but the service has never been clear exactly how that encryption was implemented or exactly which privacy and security features it offers.

Presently, Private Conversations are only available in the Insider builds of Skype. Naturally, the Universal Windows Platform version of the app—the preferred version on Windows 10—isn't yet supported. In contrast, the desktop version of the app, along with the iOS, Android, Linux, and macOS clients, all have compatible Insider builds. Private Conversations aren't the default and don't appear to yet support video calling. The latter limitation shouldn't be insurmountable (Signal's own app offers secure video calling). We hope to see the former change once updated clients are stable and widely deployed.

Withdrawing or suspending delivery of Windows Updates is not uncommon; while there is some testing done by Microsoft, releasing things to a wider audience does from time to time unearth incompatibilities or bugs within the update. What is uncommon is that Microsoft is not merely suspending this update; the company has also outlined why. Specifically, Microsoft writes that:

After investigating, Microsoft has determined that some AMD chipsets do not conform to the documentation previously provided to Microsoft to develop the Windows operating system mitigations to protect against the chipset vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown.

The Meltdown and Spectre flaws—two related vulnerabilities that enable a wide range of information disclosure from every mainstream processor, with particularly severe flaws for Intel and some ARM chips—were originally revealed privately to chip companies, operating system developers, and cloud computing providers. That private disclosure was scheduled to become public some time next week, enabling these companies to develop (and, in the case of the cloud companies, deploy) suitable patches, workarounds, and mitigations.

Windows, Linux, and macOS have all received security patches that significantly alter how the operating systems handle virtual memory in order to protect against a hitherto undisclosed flaw. This is more than a little notable; it has been clear that Microsoft and the Linux kernel developers have been informed of some non-public security issue and have been rushing to fix it. But nobody knew quite what the problem was, leading to lots of speculation and experimentation based on pre-releases of the patches.

Now we know what the flaw is. And it's not great news, because there are in fact two related families of flaws with similar impact, and only one of them has any easy fix.

The flaws have been named Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown was independently discovered by three groups—researchers from the Technical University of Graz in Austria, German security firm Cerberus Security, and Google's Project Zero. Spectre was discovered independently by Project Zero and independent researcher Paul Kocher.

As of Thursday morning local time, a San Francisco animal adoption agency will immediately halt its recent use of a controversial security robot.

The move comes after the San Francisco SPCA had been scrutinized for its deployment of a Knightscope K9 to mitigate vandalism and the presence of homeless people at its Mission District office. Knightscope, a Silicon Valley startup, declares on its website that its robots are the "security team of the future."

]]>Chrome 63 offers even more protection from malicious sites, using even more memoryhttps://arstechnica.com/?p=1228973
Thu, 07 Dec 2017 21:50:01 +0000https://arstechnica.com/?p=1228973

Enlarge/ You might need more of this stuff if you want to use Chrome's new Site Isolation mode. Well, not this stuff exactly; it's RAM from a very obsolete VAX computer. (credit: Kevin Stanchfield)

To further increase its enterprise appeal, Chrome 63—which hit the browser's stable release channel yesterday—includes a couple of new security enhancements aimed particularly at the corporate market.

The first of these is site isolation, an even stricter version of the multiple process model that Chrome has used since its introduction. Chrome uses multiple processes for several security and stability reasons. On the stability front, the model means that even if a single tab crashes, other tabs (and the browser itself) are unaffected. On the security front, the use of multiple processes makes it much harder for malicious code from one site to steal secrets (such as passwords typed into forms) of another.

Chrome's default model is, approximately, to use one process per tab. This more or less ensures that unrelated sites are kept in separate processes, but there are nuances to this set-up. Pages share a process if they are related through, for example, one opening another with JavaScript or iframes embedding (wherein one page is included as content within another page). Over the course of a single browsing session, one tab may be used to visit multiple different domains; they'll all potentially be opened within a single process. On top of this, if there are already too many Chrome processes running, Chrome will start opening new pages within existing processes, resulting in even unrelated pages sharing a process.

When a company like Microsoft needs to fix a security flaw in one of its products, the process is normally straightforward: determine where the bug lies, change the program's source code to fix the bug, and then recompile the program. But it looks like the company had to step outside this typical process for one of the flaws it patched this Tuesday. Instead of fixing the source code, it appears that the company's developers made a series of careful changes directly to the buggy program's executable file.

Bug CVE-2017-11882 is a buffer overflow in the ancient Equation Editor that comes with Office. The Equation Editor allocates a fixed-size piece of memory to hold a font name and then copies the font name from the equation file into this piece of memory. It doesn't, however, check to ensure that the font name will fit into this piece of memory. When provided with a font name that's too long, the Equation Editor overflows the buffer, corrupting its own memory, and an attacker can use this to execute arbitrary malicious code.

Mozilla is working on a major overhaul of its Firefox browser, and, with the general release of Firefox 57 today, has reached a major milestone. The version of the browser coming out today has a sleek new interface and, under the hood, major performance enhancements, with Mozilla claiming that it's as much as twice as fast as it was a year ago. Not only should it be faster to load and render pages, but its user interface should remain quick and responsive even under heavy load with hundreds of tabs.

This work is being motivated by a few things. First, the Web has changed since many parts of Firefox were initially designed and developed; pages are more dynamic in structure and applications are richer and more graphically intensive. JavaScript is also more complex and difficult to debug. Second, computers now have many cores and simultaneous threads, giving them much greater scope to work in parallel. And security remains a pressing concern, prompting the use of new techniques to protect against exploitation. Some of the rebuilt portions are even using Mozilla's new Rust programming language, which is designed to offer improved security compared to C++.