Rewterz Threat Advisory – CVE-2019-11135 – Intel CPUs Vulnerable to Variant 2 of #ZombieLoad Attack

Severity

Medium

Analysis Summary

CVE-2019-11135 – TSX Asynchronous Abort condition on some CPUs utilizing speculative execution may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable information disclosure via a side channel with local access.

The flaw affecting the Processor Diagnostic Tool is tracked as ZombieLoad Variant 2, tracked as CVE-2019-11135, is related to Intel’s Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX), which is designed to improve performance for multi-threaded software. ZombieLoad Variant 2, which Intel has described as a Transactional Asynchronous Abort (TAA) vulnerability, affects all CPUs that support TSX and have the TAA_NO bit set to 0. ZombieLoad Variant 2 also works against Intel Xeon Gold server processors with Cascade Lake microarchitecture and Core i9 processors with Coffee Lake microarchitecture. An attacker who has access to a system running the tool can exploit the vulnerability to escalate privileges, obtain information, or cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.

Impact

• Information Disclosure
• Privilege Escalation
• Denial of Service

Affected Vendors

Intel

Affected Products

• 8th Generation Intel® Core™ Processors
• 10th Generation Intel® Core™ Processor Family
• Intel® Pentium® Gold Processor Series
• Intel® Celeron® Processor 5000 Series
• Intel® Xeon® Processor E Family
• 9th Generation Intel® Core™ Processor Family
• Intel® Xeon® W Processor Family
• 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors

Remediation

• Intel recommends that users of the affected Intel® Processors listed above, update to the latest firmware version provided by the system manufacturer that addresses these issues.
• Intel recommends that users of Intel® Processor Diagnostic Tool update to version 4.1.3.35 or later.
• https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/19792/Intel-Processor-Diagnostic-Tool