How to Protect Your Devices Against Meltdown and Spectre Attacks

Recently uncovered two huge processor vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre have taken the whole world by storm, while vendors are rushing out to patch the vulnerabilities in its products. The issues apply to all modern processors and affect nearly all operating systems (Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, FreeBSD, and more), smartphones and other computing devices made in the past 20 years.

What are Spectre and Meltdown?

In short, Spectre and Meltdown are the names of security vulnerabilities found in many processors from Intel, ARM and AMD that could allow attackers to steal your passwords, encryption keys and other private information.

Both attacks abuse 'speculative execution' to access privileged memory—including those allocated for the kernel—from a low privileged user process like a malicious app running on a device, allowing attackers to steal passwords, login keys, and other valuable information.

Protect Against Meltdown and Spectre CPU Flaws

Some, including US-CERT, have suggested the only true patch for these issues is for chips to be replaced, but this solution seems to be impractical for the general user and most companies.

Vendors have made significant progress in rolling out fixes and firmware updates. While the Meltdown flaw has already been patched by most companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google, Spectre is not easy to patch and will haunt people for quite some time.

Here's the list of available patches from major tech manufacturers:

Windows OS (7/8/10) and Microsoft Edge/IE

Microsoft has already released an out-of-band security update (KB4056892) for Windows 10 to address the Meltdown issue and will be releasing patches for Windows 7 and Windows 8 on January 9th.

But if you are running a third-party antivirus software then it is possible your system won’t install patches automatically. So, if you are having trouble installing the automatic security update, turn off your antivirus and use Windows Defender or Microsoft Security Essentials.

"The compatibility issue is caused when antivirus applications make unsupported calls into Windows kernel memory," Microsoft noted in a blog post. "These calls may cause stop errors (also known as blue screen errors) that make the device unable to boot."

Apple macOS, iOS, tvOS, and Safari Browser

Apple noted in its advisory, "All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time."

To help defend against the Meltdown attacks, Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2, has planned to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre in the coming days.

Android OS

Android users running the most recent version of the mobile operating system released on January 5 as part of the Android January security patch update are protected, according to Google.

So, if you own a Google-branded phone, like Nexus or Pixel, your phone will either automatically download the update, or you'll simply need to install it. However, other Android users have to wait for their device manufacturers to release a compatible security update.

The tech giant also noted that it's unaware of any successful exploitation of either Meltdown or Spectre on ARM-based Android devices.

Firefox Web Browser

Mozilla has released Firefox version 57.0.4 which includes mitigations for both Meltdown and Spectre timing attacks. So users are advised to update their installations as soon as possible.

"Since this new class of attacks involves measuring precise time intervals, as a partial, short-term mitigation we are disabling or reducing the precision of several time sources in Firefox," Mozilla software engineer Luke Wagner wrote in a blog post.

Google Chrome Web Browser

Google has scheduled the patches for Meltdown and Spectre exploits on January 23 with the release of Chrome 64, which will include mitigations to protect your desktop and smartphone from web-based attacks.

In the meantime, users can enable an experimental feature called "Site Isolation" that can offer some protection against the web-based exploits but might also cause performance problems.

"Site Isolation makes it harder for untrusted websites to access or steal information from your accounts on other websites. Websites typically cannot access each other's data inside the browser, thanks to code that enforces the Same Origin Policy." Google says.

Here's how to turn on Site Isolation:

• Copy chrome://flags/#enable-site-per-process and paste it into the URL field at the top of your Chrome web browser, and then hit the Enter key.
• Look for Strict Site Isolation, then click the box labelled Enable.
• Once done, hit Relaunch Now to relaunch your Chrome browser.

Linux Distributions

The Linux kernel developers have also released patches for the Linux kernel with releases including versions 4.14.11, 4.9.74, 4.4.109, 3.16.52, 3.18.91 and 3.2.97, which can be downloaded from Kernel.org.

VMware and Citrix

A global leader in cloud computing and virtualisation, VMware, has also released a list of its products affected by the two attacks and security updates for its ESXi, Workstation and Fusion products to patch against Meltdown attacks.

On the other hand, another popular cloud computing and virtualisation vendor Citrix did not release any security patches to address the issue. Instead, the company guided its customers and recommended them to check for any update on relevant third-party software.

247,000 DHS Employees Affected by Data Breach

The privacy incident involved a database used by the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) which was stored in the DHS OIG Case Management System. The incident impacted approximately 247,167 current and former federal employees that were employed by DHS in 2014. The exposed Personally identifiable information (PII) of these individuals includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, positions, grades, and duty stations.

Individuals (both DHS employees and non-DHS employees) associated with DHS OIG investigations from 2002 through 2014 (including subjects, witnesses, and complainants) were also affected by the incident, the DHS said.

The PII associated with these individuals varies depending on the documentation and evidence collected for a given case and could include names, social security numbers, alien registration numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and personal information provided in interviews with DHS OIG investigative agents.

The data breach wasn’t the result of an external attack, the DHS claims. The leaked data was found in an unauthorized copy of the DHS OIG investigative case management system that was in the possession of a former DHS OIG employee.

The data breach was discovered on May 10, 2017, as part of an ongoing criminal investigation conducted by DHS OIG and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“The privacy incident did not stem from a cyber-attack by external actors, and the evidence indicates that affected individual’s personal information was not the primary target of the unauthorized exfiltration,” DHS explained.

The Department said that notification letters were sent to select DHS employees to inform them that they might have been impacted. DHS also says that it conducted a thorough privacy investigation, a forensic analysis of the compromised data, and assessed the risk to affected individuals before making the incident public.

Following the incident, the DHS says it is implementing additional security precautions to limit access to the type of information that was released in this incident and to better identify unusual access patterns.

“We will continue to review our systems and practices in order to better secure data. DHS OIG has also implemented a number of security precautions to further secure the DHS OIG network,” DHS notes.

Additional information for the affected individuals is available in an announcement and FAQ published on Jan 3.

Intel, AMD Chip Vulnerabilities Put Billions of Devices at Risk

Details of "Meltdown" and "Spectre" Attacks Against Intel and AMD Chips Disclosed There have been reports in the past few days about a critical flaw in Intel CPUs that allows an attacker to gain access to kernel space memory. It turns out that there are actually two different attacks and researchers say one of them impacts AMD and ARM processors as well.

AMD representatives have claimed that their products are not vulnerable, which has contributed to the company’s stock going up 7 percent. Intel released a statement saying that the vulnerabilities are not unique to its products after its shares lost 4 percent in value.

Meltdown and Spectre

The side-channel attacks, dubbed Meltdown and Spectre by researchers, allow malicious applications installed on a device to access data as it’s being processed. This can include passwords stored in a password manager or web browser, photos, documents, emails, and data from instant messaging apps.

Attacks can be launched not only against PCs, but also mobile devices and cloud servers. While there is no evidence of exploitation in the wild, researchers pointed out that the attacks don’t leave any traces in traditional log files and they are unlikely to be detected by security products – although security products may detect the malware that launches Meltdown and Spectre.

Meltdown was discovered independently by Jann Horn of Google Project Zero, researchers from Cyberus Technology, and a team from the Graz University of Technology in Austria. Spectre was found independently by Horn, and a group of experts from various universities and companies. Technical papers and proof-of-concept (PoC) code have been published for each of the attack methods, and Intel, Microsoft, ARM and Google Project Zero are expected to publish their own advisories.

Memory isolation mechanisms found in modern computer systems should normally prevent applications from reading or writing to kernel memory or accessing the memory of other programs. However, the Meltdown and Spectre attacks bypass these protections.

Meltdown, named so because it “melts” security boundaries normally enforced by hardware, can be leveraged to read arbitrary kernel memory locations. A malicious unprivileged app can use it to read memory associated with other programs and even virtual machines in cloud environments. The vulnerability behind Meltdown is tracked as CVE-2017-5754.

Researchers say it’s unclear if Meltdown affects ARM and AMD processors, but it has been confirmed to impact nearly every Intel processor made since 1995, specifically CPUs that implement a system known as out-of-order execution.

Spectre, on the other hand, has been confirmed to affect not just Intel, but also AMD and ARM processors. However, AMD claims there is a “near zero risk” to its processors due to their architecture.

Desktops, laptops, smartphones and cloud servers are impacted, but the vulnerability is more difficult to exploit compared to Meltdown.

The attack has been named Spectre because its root cause is speculative execution and it will “haunt us for quite some time” due to the fact that it’s not easy to fix. The CVE identifiers CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715 have been assigned to Spectre.

Spectre breaks isolation between different applications and it allows an attacker to trick programs that follow best practices to leak secrets stored in their memory.

“Meltdown breaks the mechanism that keeps applications from accessing arbitrary system memory. Consequently, applications can access system memory,” researchers explained. “Spectre tricks other applications into accessing arbitrary locations in their memory. Both attacks use side channels to obtain the information from the accessed memory location.”

Mitigations

Meltdown attacks can be prevented using kernel page table isolation (KPTI), a hardening technique designed to improve security by isolating the kernel space from user space memory. It’s based on the KAISER system developed last year by a team of researchers at Graz University.

KPTI has already been implemented in the Linux kernel and Microsoft has been working on a similar system for Windows. Apple is also said to be working on patches for macOS.

Cloud providers that use Intel CPUs and Xen paravirtualization are impacted. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure have been working on patches and they have informed customers that cloud instances will need to be rebooted in the upcoming days to apply security patches.

Google has addressed the vulnerabilities in its Cloud products and services. The company pointed out that while attacks are not easy to launch against Android devices, the latest Android security updates do provide additional protection.

Spectre attacks are more difficult to block. However, researchers say it’s possible to prevent specific known exploits using software patches.

Intel addresses concerns of performance penalties introduced by mitigations

Since KPTI has already been implemented in the Linux kernel before the disclosure – this actually led to experts figuring out that there was a serious vulnerability in Intel CPUs – several tests have been conducted to determine the impact of the mitigation on performance.

The researchers who developed the KAISER method reported a negative impact of only 0.28 percent on performance, but tests conducted now showed that performance penalties can reach as much as 30 percent, depending on what types of operations are being conducted.

Michael Schwartz, one of the researchers involved in the discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, has confirmed for SecurityWeek that there definitely can be a significant performance penalty for certain types of workloads.

“We ran some benchmarks on our initial KAISER implementation which showed only small performance impacts on modern CPUs. However, we guess that the performance penalties reported by other people (something between 5% - 30%) are realistic on older CPUs and unusual workload (e.g., many syscalls),” Schwartz said.

Intel has reassured customers that any performance impacts are workload-dependent and they should not be significant for the average user. Furthermore, the chip maker says performance impact will be mitigated over time.

A Guide to Effective Cybersecurity Risk Management

A CEO’s mission is increasingly dependent on technology. If you’re a C-level executive, you know that any disruption to your information systems can interrupt your operations, lower your supply chain, affect your reputation and compromise customer data and intellectual property. According to the 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study by the Ponemon Institute, the global average cost of a data breach is $3.62 million.

Important Cyber Risk Management Concepts  

Involve Cyber Risks in Current Risk Management and Governance Processes 

Cybersecurity is more than enforcing a checklist of requirements – cybersecurity is about being aware of and understanding current threats.

Start Cyber Risk Management Discussions With Your Team

Interact regularly with those who are responsible for managing cyber risks within your organization. By increasing your awareness of the potential threats to your business, you will better understand the impact a cyber incident could have upon it.

Enforce Industry Standards and Best Practices – Do Not Depend Upon Compliance

A robust cybersecurity program takes into account industry standards and best practices to safeguard systems and tracks potential problems; it also notes new threats and allows on-time response and recovery.

Analyze and Control Particular Cyber Risks

Determining critical assets and related impacts from cyber threats is important to understanding an organization’s exposure to risk – whether competitive, reputational, financial or regulatory. Risk assessment results can help executives to identify and prioritize particular protective measures, assign resources, notify long-term investments and implement policies and strategies.

Provide Oversight and Review

Executives have responsibility for managing and ensuring enterprise risk management. Managing cyber activities involves the continuous evaluation of cybersecurity budgets, IT outsourcing, cloud services, incident reports, IT acquisition plans, risk assessment results and top-level policies.

Develop and Track Incident Response Plans

Even a secure organization will need to be prepared to address and control cyber threats and/or deal with cyber incidents at some point in time. Network security should be an equal priority to other risks, such as those involving finances and reputation.

“What is plan B?” incident response plans should be practiced every day.

Coordinate Cyber Incident Response Planning Throughout the Organization

Responding quickly to cyber incidents can prevent or limit possible damage and requires coordination with your business leaders and stakeholders – this includes the chief information officer, the chief security officer, operators, the general counsel, the chief information security officer, public affairs and human resources. Make sure you integrate cyber incident response policies and procedures with current disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

Keep Up Awareness of Cyber Threats

Evaluating, managing and improving the cyber risk management processes, embedding risk data from different sources, active participation in threat information and sharing with partners helps organizations find and respond to incidents speedily and ensure that companies are prepared to mitigate threats.

Risk Management Process

You should begin with a cybersecurity framework structured around each area of the business to ensure an ideal risk posture.

Guidance Software advises utilizing new technologies that can identify and map data throughout the enterprise. As soon as data is mapped, enterprises make actionable decisions on how to govern it and minimize their risk footprints. For instance, even with cybersecurity training and a stable security culture, confidential information can leave an enterprise simply by accident (e.g., data stored in secret rows in spreadsheets or incorporated in notes within employee presentations or lengthy email threads). Scanning the business for essential data at rest and then eliminating any data stored where it does not belong helps to minimize random data loss.

Deloitte advises that the risk management process takes into account the five-level Capability Maturity Model approach:

1. Initial (ad hoc, chaotic and individual heroics): the beginning point for the use of an undocumented repeat process
2. Repeatable: the process is documented perfectly, and repeating the same steps may occur
3. Defined: the process is explained and affirmed as a standard business process
4. Controlled: the process is quantitatively managed as per agreed-upon metrics
5. Optimizing: the process management involves deliberate process optimization/improvement

When the risk posture is concluded, scrutinize the enterprise’s technology infrastructure to understand a baseline for the current risk posture and what the enterprise needs to shift from the current to the required state of risk exposure.

If these proactive steps are taken, there will be less risk exposure and less potential to fall victim to a cyberattack.

Deloitte also advises performing a risk/reward calculation, then standardizing those network security enhancements to achieve the greatest improvements at minimal cost. There should be incremental steps and goals, like five percent improvement within five months, that can be calculated to measure whether the enterprise is moving toward its desired cybersecurity risk posture.

Regular Process

Cybersecurity risk management is a continuous process; the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework is a helpful “living document” that is continually revised and updated as per requirements. Once an enterprise performs its original risk assessment and progresses from the existing to the desired risk posture, periodic or regular assessments should be performed to look for new vulnerabilities that will need to be addressed and managed.

Marketing Companies Exploit a Flaw in Browsers’ Built-In Password Managers to Track Users

A group of researchers from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy has discovered that at least two marketing companies, AdThink and OnAudience, that are exploiting an 11-year-old vulnerability in major browsers to track visitors.

The researchers discovered that the marketing firms have started exploiting the flaw in browsers’ built-in password managers that allow them to secretly steal email address. The gathered data allow them to target advertising across different browsers and devices.

Of course, the same flaw could be exploited by threat actors to steal saved login credential from browsers without requiring users interaction. Every browser (i.e. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Opera) implements a built-in password manager tool that allows users to save login information for automatic form-filling.

The researchers from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy discovered that both AdThink and OnAudience are exploiting the built-in password managers to track visitors of around 1,110 of the Alexa top 1 million sites across the Internet.

“We found two scripts using this technique to extract email addresses from login managers on the websites which embed them. These addresses are then hashed and sent to one or more third-party servers. These scripts were present on 1110 of the Alexa top 1 million sites.” states the analysis of  the Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

The experts have found third-party tracking scripts on these websites that inject invisible login forms in the background of the webpage, the password managers are tricked into auto-filling the form using these data.

The scripts detect the username and send it to third-party servers after hashing with MD5, SHA1, and SHA256 algorithms, these hashed values are used as an identifier for a specific user. Typically tracker used the hashed email as user’s ID.

“Login form autofilling in general doesn’t require user interaction; all of the major browsers will autofill the username (often an email address) immediately, regardless of the visibility of the form.” continue the researchers.

“Chrome doesn’t autofill the password field until the user clicks or touches anywhere on the page. Other browsers we tested don’t require user interaction to autofill password fields.”

 “Email addresses are unique and persistent, and thus the hash of an email address is an excellent tracking identifier,” the researchers said. “A user’s email address will almost never change—clearing cookies, using private browsing mode, or switching devices won’t prevent tracking.”

Third-party password managers like LastPass and 1Password are not exposed to this tracking technique because they avoid auto-filling invisible forms and anyway they require user interaction.

Users can test the tracking technique using a live demo page created by the researchers.

Below the list of sites embedding scripts that abuse login manager for tracking, it also includes the website of the founder of M5S Beppe Grillo (beppegrillo.it).