Meltdown patch made the headlines again, it can be bypassed in Windows 10

Pierluigi Paganini May 04, 2018

The problems with the mitigations for the Meltdown flaw continue a security researcher has demonstrated that the Meltdown patch in Windows 10 can be bypassed.

The Windows Internals expert Alex Ionescu discovered that a Meltdown patch issued for Windows 10 is affected by a severe vulnerability that could be exploited to bypass it.

“Calling NtCallEnclave returned back to user space with the full kernel page table directory, completely undermining the mitigation,” reads a tweet wrote on Twitter.

 

Ionescu explained that Microsoft addressed the flaw with the release of the Windows 10 version 1803, also known as April 2018 Update.

Microsoft acknowledged the issue reported by the expert and is currently working to provide a fix to include in the Windows 10 version 1790 (Fall Creators Update) thta is the only version affected.

The Meltdown and Spectre attacks could be exploited by attackers to bypass memory isolation mechanisms and access target sensitive data.

The Meltdown attack (CVE-2017-5754 vulnerability) could allow attackers to read the entire physical memory of the target machines stealing credentials, personal information, and more.

The Meltdown exploits the speculative execution to breach the isolation between user applications and the operating system, in this way any application can access all system memory.

The good news is that Meltdown attacks are not easy to conduct and the risk of exploitation is considered low.

Meltdown patch

Unfortunately, the timeline for Meltdown patch is full of problems, the first release was promptly suspended by Microsoft in January due to instability issues observed for AMD processors

A week ago, the security researcher Ulf Frisk reported that some of Meltdown and Spectre security updated Windows introduces severe flaws.

He noticed that Meltdown and Spectre security updates released by Microsoft in January and February for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 patch Meltdown are affected by a vulnerability that could be exploited by attackers to easily read from and write to memory.

According to the expert, an attacker can exfliltrate gigabytes of data per second by exploiting the vulnerability.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Meltdown patch, Windows)

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