"Thursday, March 19th, 1600 UTC, we will publish a paper (+ exploits) on exploiting Intel® CPU cache mechanisms. The attack allows for privilege escalation from Ring 0 to the SMM on many recent motherboards with Intel CPUs. Rafal implemented a working exploit with code execution in SMM in a matter of just a few hours."
"The heart-stopping thing about this particular exploit is that it hides itself in the SMM space. To put that into perspective, SMM is more privileged than a hypervisor is and it's not controllable by any Operating System. By design, the operating system cannot override or disable System Management Interupt (SMI) calls. In practice, the only way for you to know what is running in SMM space is to physically disassemble the firmware of your computer.
So, given that an SMI takes precedence over any OS call, the OS cannot control or read SMM, and the only way to read SMM is to disassemble the system makes an SMM rootkit incredibly stealthy! It is very much like the blue pill attack (the PC is living in the matrix which is under your complete control) except that SMM attacks are at an even deeper hardware level of abstraction than a hypervisor exploit! SMM has been around in Intel chips since 386 processors...
Source: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/39825?t51hb
The research, and sourcecode was disclosed on(3-13-09) over at http://invisiblethingslab.com/itl/Resources.html
Some other things (cut from the same article)
"So why would they release the exploit code to the public you ask. Aren't security researchers supposed to play by the rules and refrain from disclosure? Well here's the thing, both the CPU caching vulnerabilities and the SMM vulnerabilities already have been reported to intel."
"the first mention of the possible attack using caching for compromising SMM has been discussed in certain documents authored as early as the end of 2005 (!) by nobody else than... Intel's own employees."
Discuss
