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Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk authored
Contemporary high performance processors use a common industry-wide optimization known as "Speculative Store Bypass" in which loads from addresses to which a recent store has occurred may (speculatively) see an older value. Intel refers to this feature as "Memory Disambiguation" which is part of their "Smart Memory Access" capability. Memory Disambiguation can expose a cache side-channel attack against such speculatively read values. An attacker can create exploit code that allows them to read memory outside of a sandbox environment (for example, malicious JavaScript in a web page), or to perform more complex attacks against code running within the same privilege level, e.g. via the stack. As a first step to mitigate against such attacks, provide two boot command line control knobs: nospec_store_bypass_disable spec_store_bypass_disable=[off,auto,on] By default affected x86 processors will power on with Speculative Store Bypass enabled. Hence the provided kernel parameters are written from the point of view of whether to enable a mitigation or not. The parameters are as follows: - auto - Kernel detects whether your CPU model contains an implementation of Speculative Store Bypass and picks the most appropriate mitigation. - on - disable Speculative Store Bypass - off - enable Speculative Store Bypass [ tglx: Reordered the checks so that the whole evaluation is not done when the CPU does not support RDS ] Signed-off-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Reviewed-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de> Reviewed-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
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