Overview of Computer Security
Computer Security maintenance is an important aspect in the fast growing technical world. It means safeguarding the computer resources such as maintaining the data integrity, confidentiality and imparting access control to authorised users (Price 2018). Computer security is the procedure by virtue of which unauthorised access to the computer data can be blocked or denied. It presumes utmost importance as it keeps the data on the computer system protected and secured (Almeshekah and Spafford 2014, September). There are various threats to computer security such as Spectre and Meltdown, which have the potential to create immense problem in computer security. The paper provides a clear overview of the various threats to the computer system such as Spectre and Meltdown. The paper brings to light the various impacts on the computer system due to the above mentioned threats. It describes how these factors affect the computer security. The paper describes Spectre and Meltdown as the two major vulnerabilities that operate at the processor level and pose serious impact on the computer system. It also provides the way through which the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities affect the users. It also brings to light the procedure of execution of these vulnerabilities. Moreover, the article also states the spread of the vulnerabilities and the extent to which the people and users are affected by these vulnerabilities. The paper also describes the possible ways to mitigate the effects of the vulnerabilities as almost all the people around the world using computer system are vulnerable to be affected by the computer vulnerabilities namely Spectre and Meltdown. Finally, the paper also provides future impact of these vulnerabilities on the computer system. The article also provides the details of the mitigation techniques and also provides the procedure in which the mitigation techniques should be implemented so as to curb down the threats imparted by the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. It also clarifies that due to the impact of these future vulnerabilities the design of processors would change with the patched Operating System. Since, these factors impart serious threat to the computer security leading to data breaches and unauthorised data access, the computer systems should be secured and protected.
Spectre is a computer security vulnerability issue that mostly imparts serious threats to the modern microprocessor. The microprocessors that are involved with the branch prediction are affected by the spectre vulnerability. The computer program does not have access to other computer program but with the spectre, spying on the other computer programs have turned out to be feasible. Spectre provides pathway to the unauthorised processes to access other programs and retrieve important information (Quinones et al., 2017). This vulnerability mostly occurs due to branch misprediction as most of the processors today execute speculative execution as it is fast in providing outputs. The processors were so designed as to perform the calculations to anticipate in the background. The results of the calculations were stored in the cache memory for faster access and minimum time consumption. Due to the misprediction of the branch the process of speculative execution would reveal private data to the users that are not authorised to observe those data’s (Kocher et al., 2018). This vulnerability tricks the program by accessing and executing any arbitrary location in the program’s memory. This further enables the attacker to view to the contents of the memory and thus, obtaining significant data’s. Spectre is used basically for manipulating the process in such a way that it would reveal the important data’s. The Spectre vulnerability has serious impacts on various processors namely, Mac, Windows, iOS and Linux. The problem covers almost all the processors thus; it becomes an utmost need to mitigate the effects of spectre vulnerability (De Smet et al., 2014). The spectre vulnerability affects the computer system by removing the isolation between different applications. Moreover, the spectre vulnerability aims at allowing the attackers the access to the secured data from the Random Access Memory (RAM) of the computer system.
Spectre Vulnerability
Meltdown is also computer security vulnerability similar to the Spectre vulnerability, which has serious impacts on the IBM POWER microprocessor, Intel microprocessors and few ARM based microprocessors. Similar to the Spectre, Meltdown also allows different computer processes to read the entire memory inspite of being unable to do so. The Meltdown vulnerability affects the running systems (Trippel, Lustig and Martonosi 2018). It also has serious impacts on the recently patched version of iOS, Windows, Linux and macOS. In addition to these, the cloud services are also affected by the meltdown vulnerability. The meltdown vulnerability causes the computer to slow down between 5 and 30 percent in certain conditions of workload (Lipp et al., 2018). It slows down the computer systems by allowing a process to bypass the privilege process which is done so as to segregate those processes that are not entitled to view and access data that belongs to other process and the operating system. Unlike the spectre, Meltdown can be used to the access the privileged memory in the process, which the process itself would not be able to access. Meltdown vulnerability basically exploits the race condition of the CPU. The race condition in the CPU arises between the execution of the instruction and privilege checking, so as to isolate the processes that are unauthorized to access the data of other process (Genkin et al., 2018.). In this vulnerability the chip is loaded with secured data in such a way that it becomes easy for the attacker to read those data’s later. In this vulnerability a code gets executed that executes some attack code which leads to the loading of some secured data into the cache memory and simultaneously, the permission check takes place in parallel. Then after, a code according to the data in the cache memory is executed and a side channel technique is used to determine the value of the secured data.
Both the vulnerabilities namely, the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities aims at retrieving secured information from the computer system by allowing illegal access to the secured data. The Spectre vulnerability was reported in CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715 where as the Meltdown vulnerability was reported in CVE-2017-5754 (Simakov et al., 2018).
There are various countermeasures for the effects of vulnerabilities of Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities namely; browser related counter measures, various types of fixes and patches, and isolating the kernel memory.
The browser related counter measures of the threats posed by the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities include checking of the client software that have the potential to run the third party code which posses the code that have the ability to counter measure the effects of the threats imparted by Spectre and Meltdown. Moreover, sights such as Google chrome has a specific feature known as the Site Isolation Feature that would help in reducing the risks imparted by the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities (Maisuradze and Rossow 2018). Furthermore, the other web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox also stated that private data’s can be obtained thus, various risk association techniques are needed and such techniques are still under investigation. However, Google chrome’s Site Isolation Feature is potential enough to mitigate the risks.
Meltdown Vulnerability
Most of the industries such as Microsoft, Intel, Apple and Linux are involved in releasing patches for the attacks such as to counter measure the effect of the attack. Most of the organizations are involved in working to mitigate the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities including the Cloud based services such as Amazon and Google. Moreover, the vulnerabilities do not have the potential of modifying, corrupting or deleting data but they do pose the ability to access those data’s that they are unauthorized to view. Moreover, releasing of security updates and deploying the mitigation to the cloud services will assist the customers of windows against the vulnerabilities that pose a threat to the hardware chips of Intel, ARM and AMD (Azab et al., 2016).
Moreover, changes in the code of the Operating system kernel would serve as mitigation to meltdown vulnerability. Kernel page table Isolation patches have been developed as mitigation to the risks imparted by the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel (Waschke 2017). Thus, the fix for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities can occur through updates of the processor or the operating systems. It has also been found that be fixed through updates. Thus, the systems should be updates as soon as the updated patches are released. Moreover, the updated patches have the potential to fix the risks imparted by the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities (Chernov and Sornette 2016). However, fixing these issues would slow down the processing speed leading to slow performance. The long term fix of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities would require the innovation of new processor such that processor would eliminate the risk. Moreover, the installation of the Kernel page table isolation would slow down the processing speed of the processor (Chen et al., 2018).
However, some features in the Intel such as Process context identifiers (PCID) was introduced that possess the potential to speed up the processor as they were not affected by the updated patches. This was because the necessary information was stored in a Translation Look aside Buffer (TLB) therefore; the rapid flushing out of the cache memory was not required thus, increasing the speed of the processor (Pham et al.,2014). Various update patches are released by various vendors but whether these patches are safe to use or not is uncertain as the mitigations for the Spectre vulnerability does not work against the Meltdown vulnerability attacks. Moreover, the Spectre vulnerability is not only a hardware issue but it also requires a secure construction of the system that would be addressed with the help of both hardware and software.
Countermeasures for Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities
There are different mitigations for the Bound Check Bypass Spectre Vulnerability and the Branch Target Injection Spectre vulnerability (Ouyang et al., 2016). For the Bound Check Bypass Vulnerability certain changes should be implemented in the windows of the system such as the compilation should be done again by a new compiler hence, replacing the former compiler. In addition to this, the browser should also be hardened to block the exploitation of the system’s data through the browser via JavaScript (Russell and Van Duren 2016). Furthermore for the Meltdown vulnerability issue of Rogue Data Load in the Cache memory the change required in the windows is the separation of the user mode page table and the kernel mode page table.
Moreover, the prompt downloading and installation of the new updates should be adopted so that the risks associated with the attacks of the Spectre and Malware vulnerabilities could be curbed down (Sinclair 2014). Furthermore, unrecognised hyperlinks and websites should not be visited as they may contain the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. In addition to the above stated counter measures against the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities the users should also avoid downloading of files and applications form unknown and unrecognised sources as the files or applications would be a malicious one containing the malware that would pose threat to the computer system (Pescaroli and Alexander 2017). However, the required security updates must be downloaded. Initially, the antivirus software update should be done which should be followed by the installation of the operating system and the firmware update. It is also recommended to install the monthly updates such that the devices are secured and up to date. Once, the system updates are over, the server should also be updated so as to ensure complete security. This updation could be ensured by executing the regular package manager such that it can download the latest version of the kernel and then the device is rebooted such that it can switch to the new installed patched code.
The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities act as malware and affects adversely to almost all the available processors such as Intel, Windows, Linux and others. These vulnerabilities affect numerous modern day processors there by allowing the access to secured data in the computer memory. The processor design is constructed in such a way that the performance of the processor is optimized and enhanced, but due to these changes the attackers take advantages and steal secured data from the system (Geelen 2016). The attacks become feasible due to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. The working procedures of both the vulnerabilities are different as the Spectre vulnerability progresses with the misprediction of the branch statement where as the Meltdown vulnerability progresses by reading a different memory location and viewing the contents that the user is unauthorized to access (Quinones et al., 2017). The two vulnerabilities lead to immense loss of data such as passwords, messages, important information. They directly affect the processor of the computer system, though the counter measure for the threat posed in updation in the processor, but a complete new processor should be developed that would completely mitigate the threats as no updation has the potential of completely eliminating the risk of Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. Thus, these vulnerabilities will lead to the innovation of new processors. The security of the data in the coming future is in danger as today none of the processor are able to mitigate the risks imparted by the vulnerability. Moreover, the processor developed would have the counter effect of performance degradation (Watson et al., 2018). Moreover, the attacks on the computers have also increased as the information was leaked and cases of attacks will further increase in the near future till the complete mitigation for the malware is not constructed. Furthermore, the reduction in the security maintenance the future would encounter an increment in the number of attacks. This will lead to the establishment of more secured database. Moreover, the attacks of the Spectre and Meltdown would have a long term existence that demands the innovation of new silicon based processors that would have the potential to curb down the threats posed by the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities (Kim et al., 2016). Moreover, the new processors would require alternative implementation implementing security in the first place. However, the newly implemented software and the processor would suffer a setback of slow speed and a decrement of performance (Simakov et al., 2018). Moreover, the databases should be incorporated with decentralised database and more security features should be incorporated within it.
Conclusion
Thus, with the above discussion it can be concluded that the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities directly affect the computer users by allowing the illegal access of the important and secured information with the cache memory or from the random access memory. The two vulnerabilities were reported recently and impart severe impacts on almost all the existing processors. The Spectre vulnerabilities occur due to the misprediction of the branching statement allowing the attackers to view such information or data that they are not authorized to view. The stolen information includes personal data such as passwords, emails, photographs and many other data. Patching of the operating system serves as a mitigation of the vulnerability as running the programs on an unpatched operating system would lead to the leakage of the important and sensitive information. The Meltdown vulnerability exploitation allows the attacker to gain access on the data in the computer by running a program that would reveal such data that would be only accessed by other program or administrators. The researchers have innovated ways to mitigate the effects of the above stated vulnerabilities. The risks of the vulnerabilities could be avoided by timely updating the system software as the update patches are released. One should always update the antivirus package as it helps to protect the system against such vulnerabilities. Moreover, the browser should also be kept updated JavaScript serves as a dangerous vector that is highly susceptible for the Spectre vulnerability attack. However, the updation of the patches causes a decrease in the performance of the computer processor as the background processes operate in slow speed. In addition to it, the usage of the Kernel Page Table Isolation method (KPTI) also ensures to mitigate the threats imparted by the Meltdown vulnerability. However, the updated patches and the KPTI method do not possess the potential to completely mitigate the risk imparted by the spectre and the meltdown vulnerability. The researchers are in a continuous process to devise a way to completely mitigate the risks. Moreover, the future predictions include the usage of the silicon based processors and a more secured database such as a centralised database should be implemented.
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