ARM's Spectre V4 Mitigation Updated, Speculative Store Bypass Disable

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Security on 29 May 2018 at 08:36 PM EDT. Add A Comment
LINUX SECURITY
ARM has updated their set of Linux kernel patches providing mitigation for last week's disclosure of Spectre Variant Four.

ARM is providing an ARM64 implementation of Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) for mitigating Spectre V4. Last week they posted the initial ARM64 SSBD patches for this Speculative Store Bypass vulnerability that could lead to unauthorized information disclosure.

The Intel/AMD CPU mitigation for Spectre V4 was merged last week while some loose ends remained to tidy the code up for 64-bit ARM. The revised patches have various fixes and other minor work, but overall it looks like soon it could be ready for merging. But it remains to be seen if this work will be merged ahead of Linux 4.17.0, which is expected for release next weekend, or held off until the Linux 4.18 kernel merge window and then potentially back-ported to existing stable series.

The ARM64 SSBD patches for now can be found on the kernel mailing list.
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