--- /dev/null
+L1TF - L1 Terminal Fault
+========================
+
+L1 Terminal Fault is a hardware vulnerability which allows unprivileged
+speculative access to data which is available in the Level 1 Data Cache
+when the page table entry controlling the virtual address, which is used
+for the access, has the Present bit cleared or other reserved bits set.
+
+Affected processors
+-------------------
+
+This vulnerability affects a wide range of Intel processors. The
+vulnerability is not present on:
+
+ - Processors from AMD, Centaur and other non Intel vendors
+
+ - Older processor models, where the CPU family is < 6
+
+ - A range of Intel ATOM processors (Cedarview, Cloverview, Lincroft,
+ Penwell, Pineview, Slivermont, Airmont, Merrifield)
+
+ - The Intel Core Duo Yonah variants (2006 - 2008)
+
+ - The Intel XEON PHI family
+
+ - Intel processors which have the ARCH_CAP_RDCL_NO bit set in the
+ IA32_ARCH_CAPABILITIES MSR. If the bit is set the CPU is not affected
+ by the Meltdown vulnerability either. These CPUs should become
+ available by end of 2018.
+
+Whether a processor is affected or not can be read out from the L1TF
+vulnerability file in sysfs. See :ref:`l1tf_sys_info`.
+
+Related CVEs
+------------
+
+The following CVE entries are related to the L1TF vulnerability:
+
+ ============= ================= ==============================
+ CVE-2018-3615 L1 Terminal Fault SGX related aspects
+ CVE-2018-3620 L1 Terminal Fault OS, SMM related aspects
+ CVE-2018-3646 L1 Terminal Fault Virtualization related aspects
+ ============= ================= ==============================
+
+Problem
+-------
+
+If an instruction accesses a virtual address for which the relevant page
+table entry (PTE) has the Present bit cleared or other reserved bits set,
+then speculative execution ignores the invalid PTE and loads the referenced
+data if it is present in the Level 1 Data Cache, as if the page referenced
+by the address bits in the PTE was still present and accessible.
+
+While this is a purely speculative mechanism and the instruction will raise
+a page fault when it is retired eventually, the pure act of loading the
+data and making it available to other speculative instructions opens up the
+opportunity for side channel attacks to unprivileged malicious code,
+similar to the Meltdown attack.
+
+While Meltdown breaks the user space to kernel space protection, L1TF
+allows to attack any physical memory address in the system and the attack
+works across all protection domains. It allows an attack of SGX and also
+works from inside virtual machines because the speculation bypasses the
+extended page table (EPT) protection mechanism.
+
+
+Attack scenarios
+----------------
+
+1. Malicious user space
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+ Operating Systems store arbitrary information in the address bits of a
+ PTE which is marked non present. This allows a malicious user space
+ application to attack the physical memory to which these PTEs resolve.
+ In some cases user-space can maliciously influence the information
+ encoded in the address bits of the PTE, thus making attacks more
+ deterministic and more practical.
+
+ The Linux kernel contains a mitigation for this attack vector, PTE
+ inversion, which is permanently enabled and has no performance
+ impact. The kernel ensures that the address bits of PTEs, which are not
+ marked present, never point to cacheable physical memory space.
+
+ A system with an up to date kernel is protected against attacks from
+ malicious user space applications.
+
+2. Malicious guest in a virtual machine
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+ The fact that L1TF breaks all domain protections allows malicious guest
+ OSes, which can control the PTEs directly, and malicious guest user
+ space applications, which run on an unprotected guest kernel lacking the
+ PTE inversion mitigation for L1TF, to attack physical host memory.
+
+ A special aspect of L1TF in the context of virtualization is symmetric
+ multi threading (SMT). The Intel implementation of SMT is called
+ HyperThreading. The fact that Hyperthreads on the affected processors
+ share the L1 Data Cache (L1D) is important for this. As the flaw allows
+ only to attack data which is present in L1D, a malicious guest running
+ on one Hyperthread can attack the data which is brought into the L1D by
+ the context which runs on the sibling Hyperthread of the same physical
+ core. This context can be host OS, host user space or a different guest.
+
+ If the processor does not support Extended Page Tables, the attack is
+ only possible, when the hypervisor does not sanitize the content of the
+ effective (shadow) page tables.
+
+ While solutions exist to mitigate these attack vectors fully, these
+ mitigations are not enabled by default in the Linux kernel because they
+ can affect performance significantly. The kernel provides several
+ mechanisms which can be utilized to address the problem depending on the
+ deployment scenario. The mitigations, their protection scope and impact
+ are described in the next sections.
+
+ The default mitigations and the rationale for chosing them are explained
+ at the end of this document. See :ref:`default_mitigations`.
+
+.. _l1tf_sys_info:
+
+L1TF system information
+-----------------------
+
+The Linux kernel provides a sysfs interface to enumerate the current L1TF
+status of the system: whether the system is vulnerable, and which
+mitigations are active. The relevant sysfs file is:
+
+/sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/l1tf
+
+The possible values in this file are:
+
+ =========================== ===============================
+ 'Not affected' The processor is not vulnerable
+ 'Mitigation: PTE Inversion' The host protection is active
+ =========================== ===============================
+
+If KVM/VMX is enabled and the processor is vulnerable then the following
+information is appended to the 'Mitigation: PTE Inversion' part:
+
+ - SMT status:
+
+ ===================== ================
+ 'VMX: SMT vulnerable' SMT is enabled
+ 'VMX: SMT disabled' SMT is disabled
+ ===================== ================
+
+ - L1D Flush mode:
+
+ ================================ ====================================
+ 'L1D vulnerable' L1D flushing is disabled
+
+ 'L1D conditional cache flushes' L1D flush is conditionally enabled
+
+ 'L1D cache flushes' L1D flush is unconditionally enabled
+ ================================ ====================================
+
+The resulting grade of protection is discussed in the following sections.
+
+
+Host mitigation mechanism
+-------------------------
+
+The kernel is unconditionally protected against L1TF attacks from malicious
+user space running on the host.
+
+
+Guest mitigation mechanisms
+---------------------------
+
+.. _l1d_flush:
+
+1. L1D flush on VMENTER
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+ To make sure that a guest cannot attack data which is present in the L1D
+ the hypervisor flushes the L1D before entering the guest.
+
+ Flushing the L1D evicts not only the data which should not be accessed
+ by a potentially malicious guest, it also flushes the guest
+ data. Flushing the L1D has a performance impact as the processor has to
+ bring the flushed guest data back into the L1D. Depending on the
+ frequency of VMEXIT/VMENTER and the type of computations in the guest
+ performance degradation in the range of 1% to 50% has been observed. For
+ scenarios where guest VMEXIT/VMENTER are rare the performance impact is
+ minimal. Virtio and mechanisms like posted interrupts are designed to
+ confine the VMEXITs to a bare minimum, but specific configurations and
+ application scenarios might still suffer from a high VMEXIT rate.
+
+ The kernel provides two L1D flush modes:
+ - conditional ('cond')
+ - unconditional ('always')
+
+ The conditional mode avoids L1D flushing after VMEXITs which execute
+ only audited code pathes before the corresponding VMENTER. These code
+ pathes have beed verified that they cannot expose secrets or other
+ interesting data to an attacker, but they can leak information about the
+ address space layout of the hypervisor.
+
+ Unconditional mode flushes L1D on all VMENTER invocations and provides
+ maximum protection. It has a higher overhead than the conditional
+ mode. The overhead cannot be quantified correctly as it depends on the
+ work load scenario and the resulting number of VMEXITs.
+
+ The general recommendation is to enable L1D flush on VMENTER. The kernel
+ defaults to conditional mode on affected processors.
+
+ **Note**, that L1D flush does not prevent the SMT problem because the
+ sibling thread will also bring back its data into the L1D which makes it
+ attackable again.
+
+ L1D flush can be controlled by the administrator via the kernel command
+ line and sysfs control files. See :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line`
+ and :ref:`mitigation_control_kvm`.
+
+.. _guest_confinement:
+
+2. Guest VCPU confinement to dedicated physical cores
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+ To address the SMT problem, it is possible to make a guest or a group of
+ guests affine to one or more physical cores. The proper mechanism for
+ that is to utilize exclusive cpusets to ensure that no other guest or
+ host tasks can run on these cores.
+
+ If only a single guest or related guests run on sibling SMT threads on
+ the same physical core then they can only attack their own memory and
+ restricted parts of the host memory.
+
+ Host memory is attackable, when one of the sibling SMT threads runs in
+ host OS (hypervisor) context and the other in guest context. The amount
+ of valuable information from the host OS context depends on the context
+ which the host OS executes, i.e. interrupts, soft interrupts and kernel
+ threads. The amount of valuable data from these contexts cannot be
+ declared as non-interesting for an attacker without deep inspection of
+ the code.
+
+ **Note**, that assigning guests to a fixed set of physical cores affects
+ the ability of the scheduler to do load balancing and might have
+ negative effects on CPU utilization depending on the hosting
+ scenario. Disabling SMT might be a viable alternative for particular
+ scenarios.
+
+ For further information about confining guests to a single or to a group
+ of cores consult the cpusets documentation:
+
+ https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v1/cpusets.txt
+
+.. _interrupt_isolation:
+
+3. Interrupt affinity
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+ Interrupts can be made affine to logical CPUs. This is not universally
+ true because there are types of interrupts which are truly per CPU
+ interrupts, e.g. the local timer interrupt. Aside of that multi queue
+ devices affine their interrupts to single CPUs or groups of CPUs per
+ queue without allowing the administrator to control the affinities.
+
+ Moving the interrupts, which can be affinity controlled, away from CPUs
+ which run untrusted guests, reduces the attack vector space.
+
+ Whether the interrupts with are affine to CPUs, which run untrusted
+ guests, provide interesting data for an attacker depends on the system
+ configuration and the scenarios which run on the system. While for some
+ of the interrupts it can be assumed that they wont expose interesting
+ information beyond exposing hints about the host OS memory layout, there
+ is no way to make general assumptions.
+
+ Interrupt affinity can be controlled by the administrator via the
+ /proc/irq/$NR/smp_affinity[_list] files. Limited documentation is
+ available at:
+
+ https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/IRQ-affinity.txt
+
+.. _smt_control:
+
+4. SMT control
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+ To prevent the SMT issues of L1TF it might be necessary to disable SMT
+ completely. Disabling SMT can have a significant performance impact, but
+ the impact depends on the hosting scenario and the type of workloads.
+ The impact of disabling SMT needs also to be weighted against the impact
+ of other mitigation solutions like confining guests to dedicated cores.
+
+ The kernel provides a sysfs interface to retrieve the status of SMT and
+ to control it. It also provides a kernel command line interface to
+ control SMT.
+
+ The kernel command line interface consists of the following options:
+
+ =========== ==========================================================
+ nosmt Affects the bring up of the secondary CPUs during boot. The
+ kernel tries to bring all present CPUs online during the
+ boot process. "nosmt" makes sure that from each physical
+ core only one - the so called primary (hyper) thread is
+ activated. Due to a design flaw of Intel processors related
+ to Machine Check Exceptions the non primary siblings have
+ to be brought up at least partially and are then shut down
+ again. "nosmt" can be undone via the sysfs interface.
+
+ nosmt=force Has the same effect as "nosmt' but it does not allow to
+ undo the SMT disable via the sysfs interface.
+ =========== ==========================================================
+
+ The sysfs interface provides two files:
+
+ - /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control
+ - /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/active
+
+ /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/control:
+
+ This file allows to read out the SMT control state and provides the
+ ability to disable or (re)enable SMT. The possible states are:
+
+ ============== ===================================================
+ on SMT is supported by the CPU and enabled. All
+ logical CPUs can be onlined and offlined without
+ restrictions.
+
+ off SMT is supported by the CPU and disabled. Only
+ the so called primary SMT threads can be onlined
+ and offlined without restrictions. An attempt to
+ online a non-primary sibling is rejected
+
+ forceoff Same as 'off' but the state cannot be controlled.
+ Attempts to write to the control file are rejected.
+
+ notsupported The processor does not support SMT. It's therefore
+ not affected by the SMT implications of L1TF.
+ Attempts to write to the control file are rejected.
+ ============== ===================================================
+
+ The possible states which can be written into this file to control SMT
+ state are:
+
+ - on
+ - off
+ - forceoff
+
+ /sys/devices/system/cpu/smt/active:
+
+ This file reports whether SMT is enabled and active, i.e. if on any
+ physical core two or more sibling threads are online.
+
+ SMT control is also possible at boot time via the l1tf kernel command
+ line parameter in combination with L1D flush control. See
+ :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line`.
+
+5. Disabling EPT
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+ Disabling EPT for virtual machines provides full mitigation for L1TF even
+ with SMT enabled, because the effective page tables for guests are
+ managed and sanitized by the hypervisor. Though disabling EPT has a
+ significant performance impact especially when the Meltdown mitigation
+ KPTI is enabled.
+
+ EPT can be disabled in the hypervisor via the 'kvm-intel.ept' parameter.
+
+There is ongoing research and development for new mitigation mechanisms to
+address the performance impact of disabling SMT or EPT.
+
+.. _mitigation_control_command_line:
+
+Mitigation control on the kernel command line
+---------------------------------------------
+
+The kernel command line allows to control the L1TF mitigations at boot
+time with the option "l1tf=". The valid arguments for this option are:
+
+ ============ =============================================================
+ full Provides all available mitigations for the L1TF
+ vulnerability. Disables SMT and enables all mitigations in
+ the hypervisors, i.e. unconditional L1D flushing
+
+ SMT control and L1D flush control via the sysfs interface
+ is still possible after boot. Hypervisors will issue a
+ warning when the first VM is started in a potentially
+ insecure configuration, i.e. SMT enabled or L1D flush
+ disabled.
+
+ full,force Same as 'full', but disables SMT and L1D flush runtime
+ control. Implies the 'nosmt=force' command line option.
+ (i.e. sysfs control of SMT is disabled.)
+
+ flush Leaves SMT enabled and enables the default hypervisor
+ mitigation, i.e. conditional L1D flushing
+
+ SMT control and L1D flush control via the sysfs interface
+ is still possible after boot. Hypervisors will issue a
+ warning when the first VM is started in a potentially
+ insecure configuration, i.e. SMT enabled or L1D flush
+ disabled.
+
+ flush,nosmt Disables SMT and enables the default hypervisor mitigation,
+ i.e. conditional L1D flushing.
+
+ SMT control and L1D flush control via the sysfs interface
+ is still possible after boot. Hypervisors will issue a
+ warning when the first VM is started in a potentially
+ insecure configuration, i.e. SMT enabled or L1D flush
+ disabled.
+
+ flush,nowarn Same as 'flush', but hypervisors will not warn when a VM is
+ started in a potentially insecure configuration.
+
+ off Disables hypervisor mitigations and doesn't emit any
+ warnings.
+ ============ =============================================================
+
+The default is 'flush'. For details about L1D flushing see :ref:`l1d_flush`.
+
+
+.. _mitigation_control_kvm:
+
+Mitigation control for KVM - module parameter
+-------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The KVM hypervisor mitigation mechanism, flushing the L1D cache when
+entering a guest, can be controlled with a module parameter.
+
+The option/parameter is "kvm-intel.vmentry_l1d_flush=". It takes the
+following arguments:
+
+ ============ ==============================================================
+ always L1D cache flush on every VMENTER.
+
+ cond Flush L1D on VMENTER only when the code between VMEXIT and
+ VMENTER can leak host memory which is considered
+ interesting for an attacker. This still can leak host memory
+ which allows e.g. to determine the hosts address space layout.
+
+ never Disables the mitigation
+ ============ ==============================================================
+
+The parameter can be provided on the kernel command line, as a module
+parameter when loading the modules and at runtime modified via the sysfs
+file:
+
+/sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/vmentry_l1d_flush
+
+The default is 'cond'. If 'l1tf=full,force' is given on the kernel command
+line, then 'always' is enforced and the kvm-intel.vmentry_l1d_flush
+module parameter is ignored and writes to the sysfs file are rejected.
+
+
+Mitigation selection guide
+--------------------------
+
+1. No virtualization in use
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+ The system is protected by the kernel unconditionally and no further
+ action is required.
+
+2. Virtualization with trusted guests
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+ If the guest comes from a trusted source and the guest OS kernel is
+ guaranteed to have the L1TF mitigations in place the system is fully
+ protected against L1TF and no further action is required.
+
+ To avoid the overhead of the default L1D flushing on VMENTER the
+ administrator can disable the flushing via the kernel command line and
+ sysfs control files. See :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line` and
+ :ref:`mitigation_control_kvm`.
+
+
+3. Virtualization with untrusted guests
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+3.1. SMT not supported or disabled
+""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
+
+ If SMT is not supported by the processor or disabled in the BIOS or by
+ the kernel, it's only required to enforce L1D flushing on VMENTER.
+
+ Conditional L1D flushing is the default behaviour and can be tuned. See
+ :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line` and :ref:`mitigation_control_kvm`.
+
+3.2. EPT not supported or disabled
+""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
+
+ If EPT is not supported by the processor or disabled in the hypervisor,
+ the system is fully protected. SMT can stay enabled and L1D flushing on
+ VMENTER is not required.
+
+ EPT can be disabled in the hypervisor via the 'kvm-intel.ept' parameter.
+
+3.3. SMT and EPT supported and active
+"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
+
+ If SMT and EPT are supported and active then various degrees of
+ mitigations can be employed:
+
+ - L1D flushing on VMENTER:
+
+ L1D flushing on VMENTER is the minimal protection requirement, but it
+ is only potent in combination with other mitigation methods.
+
+ Conditional L1D flushing is the default behaviour and can be tuned. See
+ :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line` and :ref:`mitigation_control_kvm`.
+
+ - Guest confinement:
+
+ Confinement of guests to a single or a group of physical cores which
+ are not running any other processes, can reduce the attack surface
+ significantly, but interrupts, soft interrupts and kernel threads can
+ still expose valuable data to a potential attacker. See
+ :ref:`guest_confinement`.
+
+ - Interrupt isolation:
+
+ Isolating the guest CPUs from interrupts can reduce the attack surface
+ further, but still allows a malicious guest to explore a limited amount
+ of host physical memory. This can at least be used to gain knowledge
+ about the host address space layout. The interrupts which have a fixed
+ affinity to the CPUs which run the untrusted guests can depending on
+ the scenario still trigger soft interrupts and schedule kernel threads
+ which might expose valuable information. See
+ :ref:`interrupt_isolation`.
+
+The above three mitigation methods combined can provide protection to a
+certain degree, but the risk of the remaining attack surface has to be
+carefully analyzed. For full protection the following methods are
+available:
+
+ - Disabling SMT:
+
+ Disabling SMT and enforcing the L1D flushing provides the maximum
+ amount of protection. This mitigation is not depending on any of the
+ above mitigation methods.
+
+ SMT control and L1D flushing can be tuned by the command line
+ parameters 'nosmt', 'l1tf', 'kvm-intel.vmentry_l1d_flush' and at run
+ time with the matching sysfs control files. See :ref:`smt_control`,
+ :ref:`mitigation_control_command_line` and
+ :ref:`mitigation_control_kvm`.
+
+ - Disabling EPT:
+
+ Disabling EPT provides the maximum amount of protection as well. It is
+ not depending on any of the above mitigation methods. SMT can stay
+ enabled and L1D flushing is not required, but the performance impact is
+ significant.
+
+ EPT can be disabled in the hypervisor via the 'kvm-intel.ept'
+ parameter.
+
+
+.. _default_mitigations:
+
+Default mitigations
+-------------------
+
+ The kernel default mitigations for vulnerable processors are:
+
+ - PTE inversion to protect against malicious user space. This is done
+ unconditionally and cannot be controlled.
+
+ - L1D conditional flushing on VMENTER when EPT is enabled for
+ a guest.
+
+ The kernel does not by default enforce the disabling of SMT, which leaves
+ SMT systems vulnerable when running untrusted guests with EPT enabled.
+
+ The rationale for this choice is:
+
+ - Force disabling SMT can break existing setups, especially with
+ unattended updates.
+
+ - If regular users run untrusted guests on their machine, then L1TF is
+ just an add on to other malware which might be embedded in an untrusted
+ guest, e.g. spam-bots or attacks on the local network.
+
+ There is no technical way to prevent a user from running untrusted code
+ on their machines blindly.
+
+ - It's technically extremely unlikely and from today's knowledge even
+ impossible that L1TF can be exploited via the most popular attack
+ mechanisms like JavaScript because these mechanisms have no way to
+ control PTEs. If this would be possible and not other mitigation would
+ be possible, then the default might be different.
+
+ - The administrators of cloud and hosting setups have to carefully
+ analyze the risk for their scenarios and make the appropriate
+ mitigation choices, which might even vary across their deployed
+ machines and also result in other changes of their overall setup.
+ There is no way for the kernel to provide a sensible default for this
+ kind of scenarios.
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