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Wednesday, June 30th, 2021
| Time |
Event |
| 12:54a |
An EPYC escape: Case-study of a KVM breakout (Project Zero blog) Over at the Project Zero blog, Felix Wilhelm posted a lengthy account of a vulnerability he found in the Linux kernel's KVM (Kernel-based virtual machine) subsystem:
In this blog post I describe a vulnerability in KVM’s AMD-specific code and discuss how this bug can be turned into a full virtual machine escape. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first public writeup of a KVM guest-to-host breakout that does not rely on bugs in user space components such as QEMU. The discussed bug was assigned CVE-2021-29657, affects kernel versions v5.10-rc1 to v5.12-rc6 and was patched at the end of March 2021. As the bug only became exploitable in v5.10 and was discovered roughly 5 months later, most real world deployments of KVM should not be affected. I still think the issue is an interesting case study in the work required to build a stable guest-to-host escape against KVM and hope that this writeup can strengthen the case that hypervisor compromises are not only theoretical issues.
| | 3:30p |
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (fluidsynth), Fedora (libgcrypt and tpm2-tools), Mageia (nettle, nginx, openvpn, and re2c), openSUSE (kernel, roundcubemail, and tor), Oracle (edk2, lz4, and rpm), Red Hat (389-ds:1.4, edk2, fwupd, kernel, kernel-rt, libxml2, lz4, python38:3.8 and python38-devel:3.8, rpm, ruby:2.5, ruby:2.6, and ruby:2.7), and SUSE (kernel and lua53). | | 3:40p |
| | 10:35p |
[$] Mozilla Rally: trading privacy for the "public good" A new project from Mozilla, which is meant to help researchers collect browsing data, but only with the informed consent of the browser-user, is taking a lot of heat, perhaps in part because the company can never seem to do anything right, at least in the eyes of some. Mozilla Rally was announcedon June 25 as joint venture between the company and researchers at Princeton University " to enable crowdsourced science for public
good". The idea is that users can volunteer to give academic studies access to the same kinds of browser data that is being tracked in some browsers today. Whether the privacy safeguards are strong enough—and if there is sufficient reason for users to sign up—remains to be seen. |
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