Intel CPUs Massive Security Flaw issue
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Can you please elaborate a little bit this, so we can understand what you mean? Especially the "most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context ".
The whole pfSense runs as root, including the web interface afaik…My understanding of this is that one application running on the OS would be able to improperly read memory used by other applications. Obviously this is bad if some rogue app/script can pull sensitive data from other apps on a workstation. Also bad if one VM can read data from another. On a dedicated firewall, the OS is not going to be running untrusted apps. I don't see much of an attack vector on a firewall. I certainly wouldn't worry about pfSense until I had Hypervisors, servers, and end user workstations taken care of.
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Engineering question, if the Meltdown and Spectre kernel fixes reduces pfSense performance by 5% or more, is that prudent ?
If Meltdown and Spectre require malicious code running locally, all bets are off, and there are far easier methods to extract credentials.
Bottom line, are the Meltdown and Spectre fixes appropriate for an appliance like pfSense ?
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@lra:
Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Engineering question, if the Meltdown and Spectre kernel fixes reduces pfSense performance by 5% or more, is that prudent ?
If Meltdown and Spectre require malicious code running locally, all bets are off, and there are far easier methods to extract credentials.
Bottom line, are the Meltdown and Spectre fixes appropriate for an appliance like pfSense ?
From what I can tell both Meltdown and Spectre use very similar methodologies to gain access to L1 cache memory. Looks like they take advantage of speculative out-of-order features, a form of execution parallelism through predictive execution, to access L1 cache by attempting to create an out-of-order execution on one core while another core processes a prior instruction that is meant to cause an exception. It then produces a race-condition where it tries to access L1 cache from within the out-of-order sequence before the processor has time to terminate the original thread by retiring the whole set of instructions and clearing the L1 of memory and code. During this race condition, perhaps 200 clock cycles, it needs to determine if bits in memory are a 1 or a 0, the details which honestly elude me but seem to involve measuring the time caused by side-effecting the microarchitecture. Even after that it still needs to communicate that outside of the process then using the exception-handling to communicate/raise a couple of registers outside of that thread to the process where it can display the contents to the attacker.
I haven't seen any working meltdown/spectre example code that can get kernel data but a couple that successfully get user-mode memory pages. I'd find it prudent to patch on shared-infrastructure where resources aren't shared at the VM level but at the container level. For pfSense, an attacker would need to have root/wheel access as a prerequisite to the machine, so they wouldn't be needing to compile/inject cache-exploiting code into other processes to see their memory in the first place. For that reason it means it is extremely unlikely to be a primary attack vector on a firewall system.
As for CPU usage, it's difficult to tell what the performance impact will be. PostgreSQL suggests somewhere between 17% ~ 23%. I think it's fairly significant but for a firewall I don't know if anyone will notice. Our pfSense setup uses perhaps 5% ~ 10% CPU performance, so 23% I don't think will be recognizable … but who knows, maybe it'll affect traffic-shaping. For hypervisors I could see the performance impact being noticeable when systems are at or near computing capacity.
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I just came across this:
http://www.pcgamer.com/intel-ceo-sold-39-million-in-company-shares-prior-to-disclosure-of-cpu-security-flaws/ -
This is not a joke anymore. Really.
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Can you please elaborate a little bit this, so we can understand what you mean? Especially the "most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context ".
The whole pfSense runs as root, including the web interface afaik…@lra:
Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Engineering question, if the Meltdown and Spectre kernel fixes reduces pfSense performance by 5% or more, is that prudent ?
If Meltdown and Spectre require malicious code running locally, all bets are off, and there are far easier methods to extract credentials.
Bottom line, are the Meltdown and Spectre fixes appropriate for an appliance like pfSense ?
We will know more information once there's a fix in place so I would rather not speculate now. Once the fix is ready, it will be available in snapshots.
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Could you please elaborate/simplify to understand more about this statement?
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https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/issues/142
::)
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Could you please elaborate/simplify to understand more about this statement?
The vulnerabilities do not affect pfSense in a usual configuration where there are no local users that could have local execution privileges for untrusted code.
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A "Quantum of Solace" for me in that statement - (To coin a phrase)
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
This makes sense for PFSense itself, but what about packages like Snort and Suricata that actively evaluate untrusted and malicious code all the time?
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This post is deleted! -
@lra:
Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
Engineering question, if the Meltdown and Spectre kernel fixes reduces pfSense performance by 5% or more, is that prudent ?
If Meltdown and Spectre require malicious code running locally, all bets are off, and there are far easier methods to extract credentials.
Bottom line, are the Meltdown and Spectre fixes appropriate for an appliance like pfSense ?
We will know more information once there's a fix in place so I would rather not speculate now. Once the fix is ready, it will be available in snapshots.
For Reference …
DragonFlyBSD Lands Fixes For Meltdown Vulnerability
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DragonFly-Meltdown-Fixed"... system call performance is reduced, similar to Linux, when the isolation is enabled. DragonFly reports that system calls go from about 100ns to ~350ns. In typcial workloads they say you should "not lose more than 5% performance or so. System-call heavy and interrupt-heavy workloads (network, database, high-speed storage, etc) can lose a lot more performance."
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Our preliminary assessment of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities suggests that most pfSense use cases without untrusted local users or a multi-tenant context should not be concerned.
Once the FreeBSD project issues a patched release, we will incorporate those patches, test, and release new versions of pfSense.
This makes sense for PFSense itself, but what about packages like Snort and Suricata that actively evaluate untrusted and malicious code all the time?
No they don't, what they do is they analyze patterns in the incoming and outgoing connections on both the IP headers and the data payload level and then make decisions based on rules if there is an active threat going on. None of their operations involve an actual execution of untrusted program code, it would be just plain crazy if such thing was allowed.
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@KOM:
AMD's performance is so far behind that even 30% slower the Intel is still faster and I suspect they have their own issues.
From what I have read, AMD's latest Threadripper CPUs are giving Intel a run for their money, and they're cheaper. As for issues, unless you have something concrete then you can't really make that claim. I've seen others saying the same thing on other tech forums, that this Intel bug is bad but AMD might maybe perhaps possibly have something as bad or worse. It's pure FUD.
Sorry to disagree
Threadripper does nearly half the work clock per cycle of an Intel plus they run much hotter and are less power efficient
Work per clock cycle is an irrelevant measurement unless you are comparing similar architectures and even then, while it may be interesting, it still doesn't really matter. The relative performance of AMD vs. Intel depends on the workload. (This applies to Ryzen vs. Core as well as Epyc vs. Xeon.)
Anandtech rated the ThreadRipper as the best overall workstation processor, taking both price and performance into account. Here is a reference: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11891/best-cpus-for-workstations-2017
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I don't see much of an attack vector on a firewall
What about installs on hypervisors, be it local on, say vmware, or in the cloud at azure or aws?
That's where the fun begins and that's where more valuable data can be sourced from than from your home with a dedicated pfSense machine, right? -
Is is possible for pfSense to load updated CPU microcode at kernel boot as in Linux / windows ?
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Based on what I've read, pfsense users have nothing to worry about if pfsense is installed on a physical machine or if it is installed as a VM along with other virtual appliances on hardware that you own and only you use.
You start having risks when you are one of many subscribers to a cloud service and you have no idea if the other subscribers are running malware that exploits these vulnerabilities.
I'm far more worried that for most of us, the cure will be worse than the disease.
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If I have to trade speed for security, I choose security every time. With Intel, it used to be a win-win but, with recent news… I just don't believe it so blindly anymore. Of course AMD is not the cure to all your problems but it sure starts to seem a little better.
A system with a speed of zero is perfectly secure, and perfectly useless.
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PPP will still be somewhat slow after this gets patched. :)
