Speculative Store Buffer Bypass in 3 minutes

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If the news about a computer security threat that lets cyber criminals steal sensitive
information through any web browser is giving you deja vu, you're not alone.
Many are comparing this new issue, known as Speculative Store Buffer Bypass,
to the Spectre and Meltdown threats in early 2018.
And just like when Spectre and Meltdown were announced, software patches are ready to help
with this new threat.
So what makes Speculative Store Buffer Bypass different?
Imagine your computer is a restaurant.
Waiters move from table to table writing down orders, called stores, in their ticket booklets.
Think of these booklets as memory buffers
that allow them to serve several tables more efficiently.
At some point, a waiter will go to a shared station to transfer orders
from his booklet to his customers' bills.
He may decide to print out some bills in advance to have them ready, but to do this he has
to speculate that he's the only one serving his customers.
Usually he's right, but sometimes a customer will flag down a different waiter and ask
to add something else.
(Can I get some coffee?)
The new waiter adds the item to the order, but now the printed bill is incorrect.
When it's time to pay, the first waiter double checks and sees that his customer's
order no longer matches the printed bill.
He throws the old bill out and prints out a new one.
A similar process is going on in your actual computer where processors are like those busy waiters
storing data to and loading data from memory addresses.
They are buffering requests and using speculative execution to make sure all this happens as
quickly as possible.
In order to avoid errors, the processors will double check if any address used in a load
was part of a recent store to that same address.
If so, the speculative data gets thrown out,
just like our waiter threw out the incorrect bill.
The problem is, this speculation occurs in a shared, unsecured area, so it's possible
for unauthorized users to see it.
This allows an attacker to create a malicious piece of code that fools the processor into
reading from one address while it thinks it's reading from somewhere else.
By tricking the processor, attackers can steal data
like passwords and credit card numbers, undetected.
So, how can you protect yourself against a threat that doesn't look like a threat?
Technology companies have come together again to create patches
that turn off speculative execution for store buffers.
This stops unauthorized users from exploiting this vulnerability.
It's critical to install these patches right away
and stay up to date with the latest releases of operating systems.
This will reduce performance slightly for some operations but not as significantly as
the patches for Spectre and Meltdown.
Patches will continue to be optimized to reduce the impact on performance even more.
And future hardware designs will eliminate this vulnerability altogether.
New technology threats aren't deja vu,
they're a continuing challenge we all need to deal with.
That's why it's essential to keep the lines of communication open
among technology companies, communities, and researchers
to head off threats before they become huge problems.

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Speculative Store Buffer Bypass in 3 minutes

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