08-08-2019, 09:07 AM
https://www.techpowerup.com/258039/swapg...nerability
Quote:Yet another CPU vulnerability was discovered today, called SWAPGS, revealed under the code CVE-2019-1125, as it is referred to in the industry. The vulnerability was discovered twelve months ago and got privately reported to Intel by a security researcher. It's supposedly present on both AMD and Intel CPUs, but was only proven to work on Intel platforms by Bitdefender security researchers. Red Hat issued a statement which states that both platforms are affected and that users should upgrade their systems as soon as possible. Microsoft already implemented a fix with its "Patch Tuesday" update for last month, so if you updated your OS recently, you are already protected against SWAPGS.
AMD issued as statement as well, in which it says: "AMD is aware of new research claiming new speculative execution attacks that may allow access to privileged kernel data. Based on external and internal analysis, AMD believes it is not vulnerable to the SWAPGS variant attacks because AMD products are designed not to speculate on the new GS value following a speculative SWAPGS. For the attack that is not a SWAPGS variant, the mitigation is to implement our existing recommendations for Spectre variant 1."
...
Update: Performance impact of the SWAPGS mitigation has been tested with the latest Linux kernel. Phoronix benchmarked Intel's Core i9 9900K and they found a 1-5% reduction in performance for synthetic benchmarks with a general reduction of 1% on average when accounting for all benchmarks. You can check out their performance results here.