CVE-2018-3646: Infoleak

Modern operating systems implement virtualization of physical memory to efficiently use available system resources and provide inter-domain protection through access control and isolation.

The L1TF issue was found in the way the x86 microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of instructions (a commonly used performance optimisation) in combination with handling of page-faults caused by terminated virtual to physical address resolving process.

As a result, an unprivileged attacker could use this flaw to read privileged memory of the kernel or other processes and/or cross guest/host boundaries to read host memory by conducting targeted cache side-channel attacks.

CVE-2018-3620: for attack vector against the operating system (Kernel) CVE-2018-3646: for attack vector against virtualization hypervisor (KVM)

Upstream patches: ----------------- -> https://git.kernel.org/linus/958f338e96f874a0d29442396d6adf9c1e17aa2d

— Red Hat

Systems with microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and address translations may allow unauthorized disclosure of information residing in the L1 data cache to an attacker with local user access with guest OS privilege via a terminal page fault and a side-channel analysis.

— Launchpad