AMD CPU Guest Memory Vulnerabilities “Sinkclose”

[Lakados]

UAC was a good idea. But it seems to have been botched, universally panned, and disabled everywhere but enterprise. Seems that this would intercept all of the "not a person at the keyboard" attacks.

You’d think that, but depending on where you are with your updates that’s not always true.
Also plenty of Linux based exploits too that can seamlessly elevate a command too based on updates.

But yes UAC was good, legacy software though just doesn’t use the correct API’s and doesn’t trigger it like you’d expect.

 

[Mazzspeed]

Physical access is not as hard as it once was.
It doesn’t need to be a person at the keyboard, an infected USB key can do it too, modern keyboards that let you have macros on them count. There are lots of ways to run a script file locally on a machine that will do the job.
Modify a few dozen USB key to run a series of keyboard commands when inserted into a machine and drop them around the targeted area. An employee is bound to find one, and if somebody plugs that into a company asset in they are.

The point still stands that achieving anything of any practical benefit using either Spectre or Meltdown in essentially minimal to none. You're getting hex dumps of cache that's refreshed so fast your timing needs to be perfect that likely contain nothing useful unless you're really lucky and happen to grab a key in cache at just the right nanosecond - And even then, the main target is data centers; not Mum and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa types.

Both Spectre and Meltdown, like this current exploit, are nothingburgers.

Also plenty of Linux based exploits too that can seamlessly elevate a command too based on updates.

Sudo is infinitely more secure than UAC, considering UAC was intended to be more of a deterrent to developers coding software that runs as Administrator, as opposed to any form of effective privilege escalation tool.

 

[travm]

Both Spectre and Meltdown, like this current exploit, are nothingburgers.

Idk about that, the mitigations for spectre basically nerfed a couple generations of Intel chips if Im remembering correctly.

 

[Red Falcon]

Both Spectre and Meltdown, like this current exploit, are nothingburgers.

Maybe on home/personal desktop, but definitely not in enterprise and data center environments.

 

[Mazzspeed]

Idk about that, the mitigations for spectre basically nerfed a couple generations of Intel chips if Im remembering correctly.

As stated earlier, browsers have since been patched and both mitigations can be quite easily disabled if you feel you're lacking performance.

Maybe on home/personal desktop, but definitely not in enterprise and data center environments.

Never stated otherwise. However the odds of a successful attack even in data centers is minimal to none, unless you already have some form of access to the server in question - Thereby making the whole attack somewhat moot.

 

[uOpt]

I was just about to respond about it. It requires ring 0 access which ain't easy. You would have to be running an infected kernel or software that the kernel confirmed as requiring ring 0. Linus has been pretty aggressive on limiting ring 0 access for user space programs.

But there is a lot of complex software running, presenting a large attack surface, at ring-0. As discussed extensively, the Crowdstrike Antivirus. Many Anti-cheat and some copy protection schemes. 3D card drivers. Heck, the wifi drivers have a huge stack of layers, all in the kernel. IPV6.