Documentation/arch/x86/mds.rst - linux - Git at Google

 Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) mitigation
 =================================================

 .. _mds:

 Overview
 --------

 Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) is a family of side channel attacks
 on internal buffers in Intel CPUs. The variants are:

  - Microarchitectural Store Buffer Data Sampling (MSBDS) (CVE-2018-12126)
  - Microarchitectural Fill Buffer Data Sampling (MFBDS) (CVE-2018-12130)
  - Microarchitectural Load Port Data Sampling (MLPDS) (CVE-2018-12127)
  - Microarchitectural Data Sampling Uncacheable Memory (MDSUM) (CVE-2019-11091)

 MSBDS leaks Store Buffer Entries which can be speculatively forwarded to a
 dependent load (store-to-load forwarding) as an optimization. The forward
 can also happen to a faulting or assisting load operation for a different
 memory address, which can be exploited under certain conditions. Store
 buffers are partitioned between Hyper-Threads so cross thread forwarding is
 not possible. But if a thread enters or exits a sleep state the store
 buffer is repartitioned which can expose data from one thread to the other.

 MFBDS leaks Fill Buffer Entries. Fill buffers are used internally to manage
 L1 miss situations and to hold data which is returned or sent in response
 to a memory or I/O operation. Fill buffers can forward data to a load
 operation and also write data to the cache. When the fill buffer is
 deallocated it can retain the stale data of the preceding operations which
 can then be forwarded to a faulting or assisting load operation, which can
 be exploited under certain conditions. Fill buffers are shared between
 Hyper-Threads so cross thread leakage is possible.

 MLPDS leaks Load Port Data. Load ports are used to perform load operations
 from memory or I/O. The received data is then forwarded to the register
 file or a subsequent operation. In some implementations the Load Port can
 contain stale data from a previous operation which can be forwarded to
 faulting or assisting loads under certain conditions, which again can be
 exploited eventually. Load ports are shared between Hyper-Threads so cross
 thread leakage is possible.

 MDSUM is a special case of MSBDS, MFBDS and MLPDS. An uncacheable load from
 memory that takes a fault or assist can leave data in a microarchitectural
 structure that may later be observed using one of the same methods used by
 MSBDS, MFBDS or MLPDS.

 Exposure assumptions
 --------------------

 It is assumed that attack code resides in user space or in a guest with one
 exception. The rationale behind this assumption is that the code construct
 needed for exploiting MDS requires:

  - to control the load to trigger a fault or assist

  - to have a disclosure gadget which exposes the speculatively accessed
    data for consumption through a side channel.

  - to control the pointer through which the disclosure gadget exposes the
    data

 The existence of such a construct in the kernel cannot be excluded with
 100% certainty, but the complexity involved makes it extremely unlikely.

 There is one exception, which is untrusted BPF. The functionality of
 untrusted BPF is limited, but it needs to be thoroughly investigated
 whether it can be used to create such a construct.


 Mitigation strategy
 -------------------

 All variants have the same mitigation strategy at least for the single CPU
 thread case (SMT off): Force the CPU to clear the affected buffers.

 This is achieved by using the otherwise unused and obsolete VERW
 instruction in combination with a microcode update. The microcode clears
 the affected CPU buffers when the VERW instruction is executed.

 For virtualization there are two ways to achieve CPU buffer
 clearing. Either the modified VERW instruction or via the L1D Flush
 command. The latter is issued when L1TF mitigation is enabled so the extra
 VERW can be avoided. If the CPU is not affected by L1TF then VERW needs to
 be issued.

 If the VERW instruction with the supplied segment selector argument is
 executed on a CPU without the microcode update there is no side effect
 other than a small number of pointlessly wasted CPU cycles.

 This does not protect against cross Hyper-Thread attacks except for MSBDS
 which is only exploitable cross Hyper-thread when one of the Hyper-Threads
 enters a C-state.

 The kernel provides a function to invoke the buffer clearing:

     mds_clear_cpu_buffers()

 Also macro CLEAR_CPU_BUFFERS can be used in ASM late in exit-to-user path.
 Other than CFLAGS.ZF, this macro doesn't clobber any registers.

 The mitigation is invoked on kernel/userspace, hypervisor/guest and C-state
 (idle) transitions.

 As a special quirk to address virtualization scenarios where the host has
 the microcode updated, but the hypervisor does not (yet) expose the
 MD_CLEAR CPUID bit to guests, the kernel issues the VERW instruction in the
 hope that it might actually clear the buffers. The state is reflected
 accordingly.

 According to current knowledge additional mitigations inside the kernel
 itself are not required because the necessary gadgets to expose the leaked
 data cannot be controlled in a way which allows exploitation from malicious
 user space or VM guests.

 Kernel internal mitigation modes
 --------------------------------

  ======= ============================================================
  off      Mitigation is disabled. Either the CPU is not affected or
           mds=off is supplied on the kernel command line

  full     Mitigation is enabled. CPU is affected and MD_CLEAR is
           advertised in CPUID.

  vmwerv	  Mitigation is enabled. CPU is affected and MD_CLEAR is not
 	  advertised in CPUID. That is mainly for virtualization
 	  scenarios where the host has the updated microcode but the
 	  hypervisor does not expose MD_CLEAR in CPUID. It's a best
 	  effort approach without guarantee.
  ======= ============================================================

 If the CPU is affected and mds=off is not supplied on the kernel command
 line then the kernel selects the appropriate mitigation mode depending on
 the availability of the MD_CLEAR CPUID bit.

 Mitigation points
 -----------------

 1. Return to user space
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    When transitioning from kernel to user space the CPU buffers are flushed
    on affected CPUs when the mitigation is not disabled on the kernel
    command line. The mitigation is enabled through the feature flag
    X86_FEATURE_CLEAR_CPU_BUF.

    The mitigation is invoked just before transitioning to userspace after
    user registers are restored. This is done to minimize the window in
    which kernel data could be accessed after VERW e.g. via an NMI after
    VERW.

    **Corner case not handled**
    Interrupts returning to kernel don't clear CPUs buffers since the
    exit-to-user path is expected to do that anyways. But, there could be
    a case when an NMI is generated in kernel after the exit-to-user path
    has cleared the buffers. This case is not handled and NMI returning to
    kernel don't clear CPU buffers because:

    1. It is rare to get an NMI after VERW, but before returning to userspace.
    2. For an unprivileged user, there is no known way to make that NMI
       less rare or target it.
    3. It would take a large number of these precisely-timed NMIs to mount
       an actual attack.  There's presumably not enough bandwidth.
    4. The NMI in question occurs after a VERW, i.e. when user state is
       restored and most interesting data is already scrubbed. Whats left
       is only the data that NMI touches, and that may or may not be of
       any interest.


 2. C-State transition
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    When a CPU goes idle and enters a C-State the CPU buffers need to be
    cleared on affected CPUs when SMT is active. This addresses the
    repartitioning of the store buffer when one of the Hyper-Threads enters
    a C-State.

    When SMT is inactive, i.e. either the CPU does not support it or all
    sibling threads are offline CPU buffer clearing is not required.

    The idle clearing is enabled on CPUs which are only affected by MSBDS
    and not by any other MDS variant. The other MDS variants cannot be
    protected against cross Hyper-Thread attacks because the Fill Buffer and
    the Load Ports are shared. So on CPUs affected by other variants, the
    idle clearing would be a window dressing exercise and is therefore not
    activated.

    The invocation is controlled by the static key mds_idle_clear which is
    switched depending on the chosen mitigation mode and the SMT state of
    the system.

    The buffer clear is only invoked before entering the C-State to prevent
    that stale data from the idling CPU from spilling to the Hyper-Thread
    sibling after the store buffer got repartitioned and all entries are
    available to the non idle sibling.

    When coming out of idle the store buffer is partitioned again so each
    sibling has half of it available. The back from idle CPU could be then
    speculatively exposed to contents of the sibling. The buffers are
    flushed either on exit to user space or on VMENTER so malicious code
    in user space or the guest cannot speculatively access them.

    The mitigation is hooked into all variants of halt()/mwait(), but does
    not cover the legacy ACPI IO-Port mechanism because the ACPI idle driver
    has been superseded by the intel_idle driver around 2010 and is
    preferred on all affected CPUs which are expected to gain the MD_CLEAR
    functionality in microcode. Aside of that the IO-Port mechanism is a
    legacy interface which is only used on older systems which are either
    not affected or do not receive microcode updates anymore.
	Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) mitigation
	=================================================

	.. _mds:

	Overview
	--------

	Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) is a family of side channel attacks
	on internal buffers in Intel CPUs. The variants are:

	- Microarchitectural Store Buffer Data Sampling (MSBDS) (CVE-2018-12126)
	- Microarchitectural Fill Buffer Data Sampling (MFBDS) (CVE-2018-12130)
	- Microarchitectural Load Port Data Sampling (MLPDS) (CVE-2018-12127)
	- Microarchitectural Data Sampling Uncacheable Memory (MDSUM) (CVE-2019-11091)

	MSBDS leaks Store Buffer Entries which can be speculatively forwarded to a
	dependent load (store-to-load forwarding) as an optimization. The forward
	can also happen to a faulting or assisting load operation for a different
	memory address, which can be exploited under certain conditions. Store
	buffers are partitioned between Hyper-Threads so cross thread forwarding is
	not possible. But if a thread enters or exits a sleep state the store
	buffer is repartitioned which can expose data from one thread to the other.

	MFBDS leaks Fill Buffer Entries. Fill buffers are used internally to manage
	L1 miss situations and to hold data which is returned or sent in response
	to a memory or I/O operation. Fill buffers can forward data to a load
	operation and also write data to the cache. When the fill buffer is
	deallocated it can retain the stale data of the preceding operations which
	can then be forwarded to a faulting or assisting load operation, which can
	be exploited under certain conditions. Fill buffers are shared between
	Hyper-Threads so cross thread leakage is possible.

	MLPDS leaks Load Port Data. Load ports are used to perform load operations
	from memory or I/O. The received data is then forwarded to the register
	file or a subsequent operation. In some implementations the Load Port can
	contain stale data from a previous operation which can be forwarded to
	faulting or assisting loads under certain conditions, which again can be
	exploited eventually. Load ports are shared between Hyper-Threads so cross
	thread leakage is possible.

	MDSUM is a special case of MSBDS, MFBDS and MLPDS. An uncacheable load from
	memory that takes a fault or assist can leave data in a microarchitectural
	structure that may later be observed using one of the same methods used by
	MSBDS, MFBDS or MLPDS.

	Exposure assumptions
	--------------------

	It is assumed that attack code resides in user space or in a guest with one
	exception. The rationale behind this assumption is that the code construct
	needed for exploiting MDS requires:

	- to control the load to trigger a fault or assist

	- to have a disclosure gadget which exposes the speculatively accessed
	data for consumption through a side channel.

	- to control the pointer through which the disclosure gadget exposes the
	data

	The existence of such a construct in the kernel cannot be excluded with
	100% certainty, but the complexity involved makes it extremely unlikely.

	There is one exception, which is untrusted BPF. The functionality of
	untrusted BPF is limited, but it needs to be thoroughly investigated
	whether it can be used to create such a construct.


	Mitigation strategy
	-------------------

	All variants have the same mitigation strategy at least for the single CPU
	thread case (SMT off): Force the CPU to clear the affected buffers.

	This is achieved by using the otherwise unused and obsolete VERW
	instruction in combination with a microcode update. The microcode clears
	the affected CPU buffers when the VERW instruction is executed.

	For virtualization there are two ways to achieve CPU buffer
	clearing. Either the modified VERW instruction or via the L1D Flush
	command. The latter is issued when L1TF mitigation is enabled so the extra
	VERW can be avoided. If the CPU is not affected by L1TF then VERW needs to
	be issued.

	If the VERW instruction with the supplied segment selector argument is
	executed on a CPU without the microcode update there is no side effect
	other than a small number of pointlessly wasted CPU cycles.

	This does not protect against cross Hyper-Thread attacks except for MSBDS
	which is only exploitable cross Hyper-thread when one of the Hyper-Threads
	enters a C-state.

	The kernel provides a function to invoke the buffer clearing:

	mds_clear_cpu_buffers()

	Also macro CLEAR_CPU_BUFFERS can be used in ASM late in exit-to-user path.
	Other than CFLAGS.ZF, this macro doesn't clobber any registers.

	The mitigation is invoked on kernel/userspace, hypervisor/guest and C-state
	(idle) transitions.

	As a special quirk to address virtualization scenarios where the host has
	the microcode updated, but the hypervisor does not (yet) expose the
	MD_CLEAR CPUID bit to guests, the kernel issues the VERW instruction in the
	hope that it might actually clear the buffers. The state is reflected
	accordingly.

	According to current knowledge additional mitigations inside the kernel
	itself are not required because the necessary gadgets to expose the leaked
	data cannot be controlled in a way which allows exploitation from malicious
	user space or VM guests.

	Kernel internal mitigation modes
	--------------------------------

	======= ============================================================
	off Mitigation is disabled. Either the CPU is not affected or
	mds=off is supplied on the kernel command line

	full Mitigation is enabled. CPU is affected and MD_CLEAR is
	advertised in CPUID.

	vmwerv Mitigation is enabled. CPU is affected and MD_CLEAR is not
	advertised in CPUID. That is mainly for virtualization
	scenarios where the host has the updated microcode but the
	hypervisor does not expose MD_CLEAR in CPUID. It's a best
	effort approach without guarantee.
	======= ============================================================

	If the CPU is affected and mds=off is not supplied on the kernel command
	line then the kernel selects the appropriate mitigation mode depending on
	the availability of the MD_CLEAR CPUID bit.

	Mitigation points
	-----------------

	1. Return to user space
	^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

	When transitioning from kernel to user space the CPU buffers are flushed
	on affected CPUs when the mitigation is not disabled on the kernel
	command line. The mitigation is enabled through the feature flag
	X86_FEATURE_CLEAR_CPU_BUF.

	The mitigation is invoked just before transitioning to userspace after
	user registers are restored. This is done to minimize the window in
	which kernel data could be accessed after VERW e.g. via an NMI after
	VERW.

	Corner case not handled
	Interrupts returning to kernel don't clear CPUs buffers since the
	exit-to-user path is expected to do that anyways. But, there could be
	a case when an NMI is generated in kernel after the exit-to-user path
	has cleared the buffers. This case is not handled and NMI returning to
	kernel don't clear CPU buffers because:

	1. It is rare to get an NMI after VERW, but before returning to userspace.
	2. For an unprivileged user, there is no known way to make that NMI
	less rare or target it.
	3. It would take a large number of these precisely-timed NMIs to mount
	an actual attack. There's presumably not enough bandwidth.
	4. The NMI in question occurs after a VERW, i.e. when user state is
	restored and most interesting data is already scrubbed. Whats left
	is only the data that NMI touches, and that may or may not be of
	any interest.


	2. C-State transition
	^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

	When a CPU goes idle and enters a C-State the CPU buffers need to be
	cleared on affected CPUs when SMT is active. This addresses the
	repartitioning of the store buffer when one of the Hyper-Threads enters
	a C-State.

	When SMT is inactive, i.e. either the CPU does not support it or all
	sibling threads are offline CPU buffer clearing is not required.

	The idle clearing is enabled on CPUs which are only affected by MSBDS
	and not by any other MDS variant. The other MDS variants cannot be
	protected against cross Hyper-Thread attacks because the Fill Buffer and
	the Load Ports are shared. So on CPUs affected by other variants, the
	idle clearing would be a window dressing exercise and is therefore not
	activated.

	The invocation is controlled by the static key mds_idle_clear which is
	switched depending on the chosen mitigation mode and the SMT state of
	the system.

	The buffer clear is only invoked before entering the C-State to prevent
	that stale data from the idling CPU from spilling to the Hyper-Thread
	sibling after the store buffer got repartitioned and all entries are
	available to the non idle sibling.

	When coming out of idle the store buffer is partitioned again so each
	sibling has half of it available. The back from idle CPU could be then
	speculatively exposed to contents of the sibling. The buffers are
	flushed either on exit to user space or on VMENTER so malicious code
	in user space or the guest cannot speculatively access them.

	The mitigation is hooked into all variants of halt()/mwait(), but does
	not cover the legacy ACPI IO-Port mechanism because the ACPI idle driver
	has been superseded by the intel_idle driver around 2010 and is
	preferred on all affected CPUs which are expected to gain the MD_CLEAR
	functionality in microcode. Aside of that the IO-Port mechanism is a
	legacy interface which is only used on older systems which are either
	not affected or do not receive microcode updates anymore.