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Mark Jacobs

> David Crayford <mailto:[email protected]>
> January 5, 2018 at 7:09 AM
>
>
> Indeed. And there are Linux patches for AMD WRT RDSTC speculation
> exploits
> https://github.com/openSUSE/kernel/commit/6a334d96b8c8924357e2c692c305066f512ec1b8.
>
>
>
> IBM remain tight lipped about z/OS exploits but are releasing patches
> for POWER which shares a similar DNA to Z, so I wonder if there are
> vulnerabilities.
>
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> Cannaerts, Jan <mailto:[email protected]>
> January 5, 2018 at 4:53 AM
> >Example code is already out there
> >https://gist.github.com/ErikAugust/724d4a969fb2c6ae1bbd7b2a9e3d4bb6
> <https://gist.github.com/ErikAugust/724d4a969fb2c6ae1bbd7b2a9e3d4bb6>.
> I
> >built this on my PC and it worked! Is there a zArch instruction to flush
> >a cache line like the _mm_clflush() built-in for x86? If so it would be
> >easy to compile and run spectre.c on z/OS and see what happens.
>
> Parts of Spectre consist of training the branch predictor to predict
> that the
> branch will go to an address you want it to perform speculative
> execution on.
> The research teams have targeted Intel's Haswell line in particular
> for this.
>
> It also relies on the branch predictor masking the addresses in the branch
> target buffer. The higher parts of the addresses are ignored, giving
> much more
> freedom to the attacker. Furthermore the entries in the BTB are not
> linked to
> an invididual address-space. The branch predictor will use a
> prediction that
> it was trained from in address space A, in address space B. I don't know
> enough about branch prediction on z/Arch to tell you if it's as
> trainable as
> the Intel or AMD branch predictors.
>
> And as you said, you need some control over what lives in the cache
> and what
> does not. There are some z/Arch instructions to mark cached data as no
> longer
> important, but the PoP specifically mentions that the CPU does not
> necessarily
> remove the data from cache. You can trick the CPU in to filling the
> cache with
> junk that you're using in a dummy process though.
>
> The code in the example is still Intel specific. AMD is an "Intel
> clone", as far
> as instruction set and behavior goes, but they differ on a microcode
> level.
> x86 and z/Arch differ in many more ways.
>
> -
> Jan
>
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-- 

Mark Jacobs
Time Customer Service
Global Technology Services

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.
Lt. Gen. David Morrison


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