Monthly Archives: November 2018

Oracle VirtualBox Zero Day Disclosed


How severe is this vulnerability?


How can an attacker exploit this vulnerability?

How can I protect myself from this vulnerability?


Thank you.

November 2018 Update Summary










Adobe Flash Player: Priority 2: Resolves 1x Important CVE

Adobe Photoshop CC: Priority 3: Resolves 1x Important CVE









Microsoft Dynamics 365

Windows Deployment Services (if used within your organization)


Windows VBScript

Microsoft Graphics Component

Microsoft Bitlocker

Please install the remaining updates at your earliest convenience.


Please find below summaries of other notable updates released this month.

Thank you.

Nvidia Graphics Drivers:

PortSmash Vulnerability: What you need to know

Security researchers have released details of a new side channel attack known as “PortSmash” that can be used to steal information from processes running inside a computer systems CPU (defined)) when Intel Hyperthreading (HT)(defined here and here) is enabled. Their proof of concept allowed them to steal a private decryption from a thread running in the same core as their exploit. This thread belonged to an OpenSSL process.

How severe is this vulnerability?
It has been designated as CVE-2018-5407 and assigned a base score of 4.8 (medium severity) on the CVSS v3 scale (defined) with a high attack complexity and with only low privileges required. The attack cannot be exploited remotely. An attacker must have been able to compromise your system via another means most likely a phishing email (social engineering)(phishing: defined; social engineering: defined), accidentally clicking a malicious link or a drive by download (defined). The attacker will also still need to have their code running within the same core as the data/code they wish to obtain. Similar to Spectre; multi-tenant cloud environments are more at risk.

Red Hat’s security advisory states “In order to exploit this flaw, the attacker needs to run a malicious process on the same core of the processor as the victim process”. PortSmash is fundamentally different from Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities; it does not rely on speculative execution.

Collin Percival, a Computer Scientist summed up the attack as follows:

“I’ve been getting a few questions about the recent “PortSmash” vulnerability announcement. Short answer: This is not something you need to worry about. If your code is vulnerable to it, you were already vulnerable to other (easier) attacks.

He advises that users don’t need to worry about it and states: “the defence against microarchitectural side channel attacks from 2005: Make sure that the cryptographic key you’re using does not affect the sequence of instructions or memory accesses performed by your code”.

How does this vulnerability work?
When a thread (defined) is carrying out some work it has its own instructions (what to do) and data (the objects to work on) but it will share some of its hardware resources with another process operating on a collocated thread.

The attackers can obtain information about the decryption key by analysing how fast the (process) thread within the CPU is operating with particular assembly language (defined) instructions and uses that information to work backwards (reverse engineering) on what possible data was used as the input to achieve this data now being processed. In this case the data is a private decryption key (defined).

Explained another way: This attack uses instruction timing (how long it takes to process) based on port contention. Each core of a CPU has physical regions known as ports which carry out the necessary calculations. If two or more threads are processing at the same they may have to wait on each other to use those regions of the CPU.

PortSmash seeks to monopolise a port which is being shared with a thread with information the attack wishes to obtain. They can measure the time taken between instructions of the attackers thread and the legitimate thread (thus determining how long the legitimate thread spend processing). This will help to obtain the data being processed over a long period of time

PortSmash is a side channel attack meaning that the attacker doesn’t immediately find out the protected/secret value immediately; instead the attack seeks out information from the other thread running within the CPU for information on the secret value being processed.

The proof of concept code targeted OpenSSL but is not limited to just that software. OpenSSL was targeted due to the researcher’s familiarity with the OpenSSL code.

What CPUs are affected by this vulnerability?
The researchers verified that this vulnerability is present on Intel Skylake CPUs (6th generation Core models e.g. i7 6700K). However any Intel CPU which implements HT is likely to have this vulnerability. Intel’s Nehalem architecture first introduced HT in 2008. The researchers believe AMD Ryzen CPUs may be affected but did not confirm this.

How can I protect myself from this vulnerability?
OpenSSL have added a fix to version 1.1.1 and older versions greater than version 1.1.0i (Source)

However the only true means of mitigating this vulnerability for all software is to disable Intel’s HT. The operating system distribution OpenBSD has done so since June this year. Similarly Intel within their new 9th generation Core CPUs disabled HT to enable hardware protections against the Meltdown, Spectre and L1 Terminal Fault vulnerabilities. They did so to their gaming focused CPUs since many games don’t leverage HT and thus don’t suffer a performance penalty from not using it. It doesn’t appear that HT was removed for security concerns since the Core i9 9900K still features it.

Since corporate organizations may have invested in software that uses HT; they should only consider turning it off if continuing to use it places them at a high risk of exploitation and would place them outside of what they consider an acceptable risk. They will then need to consider the performance/security trade-off of doing so.

If you use Intel HT I would recommend testing your own software with this feature turned off to tell if it has too much of a performance penalty for your particular use cases. From researching this it is not a straightforward answer of turning it off and definitely not experiencing any slowdown; it may or may not happen depending on how you use your system and the software you use.

I have provided links to definitions of HT above and some references below which may assist you in making a decision to disable or leave it enabled. That research also pointed out that if you wish to disable HT; please do so from the BIOS (defined) of your computing system since it will have a blanket disablement across all software and your operating system. A software disablement can work but disabling via the BIOS leaves less room for error. Please refer to your system manufacturer or motherboard user guide for the steps to enter the BIOS of the system and disable this feature.

As more details of this vulnerability emerge I will consider disabling this feature on my water cooled Intel Core i9 7980XE CPU. Windows detects it with 36 logical cores; with HT disabled it will “drop” to 18 physical cores. I’ll need to evaluate the performance impact (if any) for my particular use cases. Given the attacker will need to already have compromised my system and the attack is of high complexity; it’s less likely I will need to disable HT. My existing security controls are more than enough to mitigate this risk; but your system, configuration and risk appetite may be different.

Thank you.



Why You Disable Hyper-Threading or NOT, and How to Know the Difference

Nehalem – Everything You Need to Know about Intel’s New Architecture



Performance-impact of Hyper-Threading:


Is Hyper-Threading a Fundamental Security Risk?

Why does disabling hyperthreading supposedly give better gaming performance? (This is again a gaming focused discussion but would be relevant for software that does not use HT):


Why on earth would you disable Hyperthreading? (This is a more gaming focused discussion but would be relevant for software that does not use HT. Please ignore the advert spam posts for software named CPUCores, it’s confirmedsnake oil”):


Retpoline To Improve Windows 10 Performance Following Spectre Vulnerability

Alex Ionescu, a Windows Internals expert and Security Architect with CrowdStrike in mid-October provided new insight into performance improvements coming to the next update of Windows, namely 19H1 or Version 1903:

With performance decreases estimated to be up to 30% in the worst-case scenarios while mitigating the Spectre vulnerabilities earlier this year; the upcoming version of Windows will add Google’s Retpoline instructions to improve performance:

Such instructions are already present in Red Hat, SUSE and Oracle Linux 6 and 7. Ionescu revealed that performance was significantly improved while trusting the newer version of Windows 10. Moreover; Spectre variant 2 (CVE-2017-5715) will now be fully mitigated even if your hardware was not updated to support indirect branch restricted speculation (IBRS); making it more secure. In his words “On systems without IBRS, Windows won’t flush the BPB on kernel->user transitions. This opens up a potential security issue for CPUs without microcode that implements IBRS”.

He also confirmed that Retpoline is enabled on systems with indirect branch prediction barrier (IBPB). This will protect such systems from kernel to user transitions where currently no protection exists. Finally he asked that Retpoline be back ported earlier (but currently supported) versions of Windows since systems without IBRS are “sitting ducks”:

These changes were also announced by a Microsoft engineer, Mehmet Iyigun working within the Windows and Azure kernel team.

In April 2019 we can look forward to a more secure and faster version of Windows. I’m particularly pleased to learn this since my water cooled Intel processor; an 18 core (36 thread) Core i9 7980XE has received full protection from Spectre in the form of IBRS and IBPB from the motherboard vendor. Performance impact has been minimal but any increase in performance is welcomed for my donations to Stanford’s Folding@Home project.

More info on IBRS and IBPB is available from this link. Thank you.

Windows Data Sharing Service Zero Day Disclosed

In late October, a new Windows zero day vulnerability (defined) was publicly disclosed (defined) by the security researcher SandboxEscaper (the same researcher who disclosed the Task Scheduler zero day in early September. This vulnerability affects a Windows service; Data Sharing Service (dssvc.dll) present in Windows 10 and its Server equivalents 2016 and 2019. Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 (and their Server equivalents (Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 R2) are not affected.

How severe is this vulnerability and what is its impact?
Similar to the Task Scheduler vulnerability; this vulnerability is not remotely exploitable by an attacker (more on this below). This vulnerability should be considered medium but not critical severity. When exploited it can allow an attacker to delete any files they choose since they will inherit the same level of permission (privilege escalation)(defined) as the Data Sharing Service namely LocalSystem privileges (the highest level of privilege)(defined) but they cannot initiate this automatically/remotely. They must socially engineer a potential victim into opening an attachment (most likely sent over email or via instant messaging etc.).

As with the Task Scheduler vulnerability; this vulnerability may be leveraged in the wild before it is patched by Microsoft; this is my reason for advising exercising caution with email and clicking unexpected links.

While security researchers such as Will Dormann (mentioned above) and Kevin Beaumont were successful in verifying the proof of concept code worked; they class the vulnerability difficult to exploit. This was verified by Acros Security CEO Mitja Kolsek noting he could not find a “generic way to exploit this for arbitrary code execution.” Indeed, SandboxEscaper described the vulnerability as a low quality bug (making it a “pain” to exploit). Tom Parson’s from Tenable (the vendor of the Nessus vulnerability scanner) summed it up nicely stating “to put the threat into perspective, an attacker would already need access to the system or to combine it with a remote exploit to leverage the vulnerability”.

The vulnerability may allow the attacker to perform DLL hijacking (defined) by deleting key system DLLs (defined) and then replacing them with malicious versions (by writing those malicious files to a folder they have now have access to). Alternatively this functionality could be used to make a system unbootable by for example deleting the pci.sys driver. This has earned the vulnerability the name “Deletebug.”

How can I protect my organization/myself from this vulnerability?
As before with the Task Scheduler vulnerability; please continue to exercise standard vigilance in particular when using email; e.g. don’t click on suspicious links received within emails, social media, via chat applications etc. Don’t open attachments you weren’t expecting within an email (even if you know the person; since their email account or device they access their email from may have been compromised) and download updates for your software and devices from trusted sources e.g. the software/device vendors. This US-CERT advisory also provides advice for safely handling emails.

If you choose to; the firm 0patch has issued a micro-patch for this vulnerability. They developed the fix within 7 hours of the vulnerabilities disclosure. It blocks the exploit by adding impersonation to the DeleteFileW call. This was the same firm who micro-patched the recent Windows Task Scheduler vulnerability and JET vulnerabilities. Moreover; this vulnerability may be patched tomorrow when Microsoft releases their November 2018 updates.


It can be obtained by installing and registering 0patch Agent from Such micropatches usually install and need no further action when Microsoft officially patches the vulnerability since the micropatch is only active when a vulnerable version of the affected file is used; once patched the micropatch has no further effect (it is then unnecessary).

Thank you.