commit 9a32a7e78b upstream.
IBM Power9 processors can speculatively operate on data in the L1 cache before
it has been completely validated, via a way-prediction mechanism. It is not possible
for an attacker to determine the contents of impermissible memory using this method,
since these systems implement a combination of hardware and software security measures
to prevent scenarios where protected data could be leaked.
However these measures don't address the scenario where an attacker induces
the operating system to speculatively execute instructions using data that the
attacker controls. This can be used for example to speculatively bypass "kernel
user access prevention" techniques, as discovered by Anthony Steinhauser of
Google's Safeside Project. This is not an attack by itself, but there is a possibility
it could be used in conjunction with side-channels or other weaknesses in the
privileged code to construct an attack.
This issue can be mitigated by flushing the L1 cache between privilege boundaries
of concern. This patch flushes the L1 cache after user accesses.
This is part of the fix for CVE-2020-4788.
Signed-off-by: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Axtens <dja@axtens.net>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
31ebc2fe02