An industry-wide issue was found in the way many modern microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of instructions past bounds check. The flaw relies on the presence of a precisely-defined instruction sequence in the privileged code and the fact that memory writes occur to an address which depends on the untrusted value. Such writes cause an update into the microprocessor's data cache even for speculatively executed instructions that never actually commit (retire). As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this flaw to influence speculative execution and/or read privileged memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks.
Find out more about CVE-2018-3693 from the
MITRE CVE dictionary dictionary and
NIST NVD.
Statement
This issue affects the versions of the Linux kernel as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6, 7 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2. Future kernel updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6, 7 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2 may address this issue.