Transient execution CPU vulnerability

Main articles: Downfall (security vulnerability), Foreshadow, Lazy FP state restore, Load value injection, Meltdown (security vulnerability), Microarchitectural Data Sampling, Retbleed, Spectre (security vulnerability), Speculative Store Bypass, and SWAPGS (security vulnerability)

Transient execution CPU vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities in which instructions, most often optimized using speculative execution, are executed temporarily by a microprocessor, without committing their results due to a misprediction or error, resulting in leaking secret data to an unauthorized party. The archetype is Spectre, and transient execution attacks like Spectre belong to the cache-attack category, one of several categories of side-channel attacks. Since January 2018 many different cache-attack vulnerabilities have been identified.

Overview

Modern computers are highly parallel devices, composed of components with very different performance characteristics. If an operation (such as a branch) cannot yet be performed because some earlier slow operation (such as a memory read) has not yet completed, a microprocessor may attempt to predict the result of the earlier operation and execute the later operation speculatively, acting as if the prediction were correct. The prediction may be based on recent behavior of the system. When the earlier, slower operation completes, the microprocessor determines whether the prediction was correct or incorrect. If it was correct then execution proceeds uninterrupted; if it was incorrect then the microprocessor rolls back the speculatively executed operations and repeats the original instruction with the real result of the slow operation. Specifically, a transient instruction^[1] refers to an instruction processed by error by the processor (incriminating the branch predictor in the case of Spectre) which can affect the micro-architectural state of the processor, leaving the architectural state without any trace of its execution.

In terms of the directly visible behavior of the computer it is as if the speculatively executed code "never happened". However, this speculative execution may affect the state of certain components of the microprocessor, such as the cache, and this effect may be discovered by careful monitoring of the timing of subsequent operations.

If an attacker can arrange that the speculatively executed code (which may be directly written by the attacker, or may be a suitable gadget that they have found in the targeted system) operates on secret data that they are unauthorized to access, and has a different effect on the cache for different values of the secret data, they may be able to discover the value of the secret data.

Timeline

2018

In early January 2018, it was reported that all Intel processors made since 1995^[2][3] (besides Intel Itanium and pre-2013 Intel Atom) have been subject to two security flaws dubbed Meltdown and Spectre.^[4][5]

The impact on performance resulting from software patches is "workload-dependent". Several procedures to help protect home computers and related devices from the Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities have been published.^[6][7][8][9] Spectre patches have been reported to significantly slow down performance, especially on older computers; on the newer 8th-generation Core platforms, benchmark performance drops of 2–14% have been measured.^[10] Meltdown patches may also produce performance loss.^[11][12][13] It is believed that "hundreds of millions" of systems could be affected by these flaws.^[3][14] More security flaws were disclosed on May 3, 2018,^[15] on August 14, 2018, on January 18, 2019, and on March 5, 2020.^{[16][17][18][19]}

At the time, Intel was not commenting on this issue.^[20][21]

On March 15, 2018, Intel reported that it will redesign its CPUs (performance losses to be determined) to protect against the Spectre security vulnerability, and expects to release the newly redesigned processors later in 2018.^[22][23]

On May 3, 2018, eight additional Spectre-class flaws were reported. Intel reported that they are preparing new patches to mitigate these flaws.^[24]

On August 14, 2018, Intel disclosed three additional chip flaws referred to as L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF). They reported that previously released microcode updates, along with new, pre-release microcode updates can be used to mitigate these flaws.^[25][26]

2019

On January 18, 2019, Intel disclosed three new vulnerabilities affecting all Intel CPUs, named "Fallout", "RIDL", and "ZombieLoad", allowing a program to read information recently written, read data in the line-fill buffers and load ports, and leak information from other processes and virtual machines.^[27][28][29] Coffee Lake-series CPUs are even more vulnerable, due to hardware mitigations for Spectre.^{[citation needed][30]}

2020

On March 5, 2020, computer security experts reported another Intel chip security flaw, besides the Meltdown and Spectre flaws, with the systematic name CVE-2019-0090 (or "Intel CSME Bug").^[16] This newly found flaw is not fixable with a firmware update, and affects nearly "all Intel chips released in the past five years".^[17][18][19]

2021

In March 2021 AMD security researchers discovered that the Predictive Store Forwarding algorithm in Zen 3 CPUs could be used by malicious applications to access data it shouldn't be accessing.^[31] According to Phoronix there's little performance impact in disabling the feature.^[32]

In June 2021, two new vulnerabilities, Speculative Code Store Bypass (SCSB, CVE-2021-0086) and Floating Point Value Injection (FPVI, CVE-2021-0089), affecting all modern x86-64 CPUs both from Intel and AMD were discovered.^[33] In order to mitigate them software has to be rewritten and recompiled. ARM CPUs are not affected by SCSB but some certain ARM architectures are affected by FPVI.^[34]

Also in June 2021, MIT researchers revealed the PACMAN attack on Pointer Authentication Codes (PAC) in ARM v8.3A.^[35][36][37]

In August 2021 a vulnerability called "Transient Execution of Non-canonical Accesses" affecting certain AMD CPUs was disclosed.^[38][39][40] It requires the same mitigations as the MDS vulnerability affecting certain Intel CPUs.^[41] It was assigned CVE-2020-12965. Since most x86 software is already patched against MDS and this vulnerability has the exact same mitigations, software vendors don't have to address this vulnerability.

In October 2021 for the first time ever a vulnerability similar to Meltdown was disclosed^[42][43] to be affecting all AMD CPUs however the company doesn't think any new mitigations have to be applied and the existing ones are already sufficient.^[44]

2022

In March 2022, a new variant of the Spectre vulnerability called Branch History Injection was disclosed.^[45][46] It affects certain ARM64 CPUs^[47] and the following Intel CPU families: Cascade Lake, Ice Lake, Tiger Lake and Alder Lake. According to Linux kernel developers AMD CPUs are also affected.^[48]

In March 2022, a vulnerability affecting a wide range of AMD CPUs was disclosed under CVE-2021-26341.^[49][50]

In June 2022, multiple MMIO Intel CPUs vulnerabilities related to execution in virtual environments were announced.^[51] The following CVEs were designated: CVE-2022-21123, CVE-2022-21125, CVE-2022-21166.

In July 2022, the Retbleed vulnerability was disclosed affecting Intel Core 6 to 8th generation CPUs and AMD Zen 1, 1+ and 2 generation CPUs. Newer Intel microarchitectures as well as AMD starting with Zen 3 are not affected. The mitigations for the vulnerability decrease the performance of the affected Intel CPUs by up to 39%, while AMD CPUs lose up to 14%.

In August 2022, the SQUIP vulnerability was disclosed affecting Ryzen 2000–5000 series CPUs.^[52] According to AMD the existing mitigations are enough to protect from it.^[53]

According to a Phoronix review released in October, 2022 Zen 4/Ryzen 7000 CPUs are not slowed down by mitigations, in fact disabling them leads to a performance loss.^[54][55]

2023

In February 2023 a vulnerability affecting a wide range of AMD CPU architectures called "Cross-Thread Return Address Predictions" was disclosed.^[56][57][58]

In July 2023 a critical vulnerability in the Zen 2 AMD microarchitecture called Zenbleed was made public.^[59] AMD released a microcode update to fix it.^[60]

In August 2023 a vulnerability in AMD's Zen 1, Zen 2, Zen 3, and Zen 4 microarchitectures called Inception^[61][62] was revealed and assigned CVE-2023-20569. According to AMD it is not practical but the company will release a microcode update for the affected products.

Also in August 2023 a new vulnerability called Downfall or Gather Data Sampling was disclosed,^[63][64][65] affecting Intel CPU Skylake, Cascade Lake, Cooper Lake, Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, Amber Lake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, Comet Lake & Rocket Lake CPU families. Intel will release a microcode update for affected products.

The SLAM^{[66][67][68][69]} vulnerability (Spectre based on Linear Address Masking) reported in 2023 neither has received a corresponding CVE, nor has been confirmed or mitigated against.

2024

In March 2024, a variant of Spectre-V1 attack called GhostRace was published.^[70] It was claimed it affected all the major microarchitectures and vendors, including Intel, AMD and ARM. It was assigned CVE-2024-2193. AMD dismissed the vulnerability (calling it "Speculative Race Conditions (SRCs)") claiming that existing mitigations were enough.^[71] Linux kernel developers chose not to add mitigations citing performance concerns.^[72] The Xen hypervisor project released patches to mitigate the vulnerability but they are not enabled by default.^[73]

Also in March 2024, a vulnerability in Intel Atom processors called Register File Data Sampling (RFDS) was revealed.^[74] It was assigned CVE-2023-28746. Its mitigations incur a slight performance degradation.^[75]

In April 2024, it was revealed that the BHI vulnerability in certain Intel CPU families could be still exploited in Linux entirely in user space without using any kernel features or root access despite existing mitigations.^[76][77][78] Intel recommended "additional software hardening".^[79] The attack was assigned CVE-2024-2201.

In June 2024, Samsung Research and Seoul National University researchers revealed the TikTag attack against the Memory Tagging Extension in ARM v8.5A CPUs. The researchers created PoCs for Google Chrome and the Linux kernel.^{[80][81][82][83]} Researchers from VUSec previously revealed ARM's Memory Tagging Extension is vulnerable to speculative probing.^[84][85]

In July 2024, UC San Diego researchers revealed the Indirector attack against Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake CPUs leveraging high-precision Branch Target Injection (BTI).^[86][87][88] Intel downplayed the severity of the vulnerability and claimed the existing mitigations are enough to tackle the issue.^[89] No CVE was assigned.

2025

In January, 2025 Georgia Institute of Technology researchers published two whitepapers on Data Speculation Attacks via Load Address Prediction on Apple Silicon (SLAP) and Breaking the Apple M3 CPU via False Load Output Predictions (FLOP).^[90][91][92]

In January 2025, Arm disclosed a vulnerability (CVE-2024-7881) in which an unprivileged context can trigger a data memory-dependent prefetch engine to fetch data from a privileged location, potentially leading to unauthorized access. To mitigate the issue, Arm recommends disabling the affected prefetcher by setting CPUACTLR6_EL1[41].^[93][94]

Future

Spectre class vulnerabilities will remain unfixed because otherwise CPU designers will have to disable speculative execution which will entail a massive performance loss.^{[citation needed]} Despite this, AMD has managed to design Zen 4 such a way its performance is not affected by mitigations.^[54][55]

Vulnerabilities and mitigations summary

Mitigation Type	Comprehensiveness	Effectiveness	Performance impact	Description
Hardware	Full	Full	None to small	Require changes to the CPU design and thus a new iteration of hardware
Microcode	Partial to full	Partial to full	None to large	Updates the software that the CPU runs on which requires patches to be released for each affected CPU and integrated into every BIOS or operating system
OS/VMM	Partial	Partial to full	Small to large	Applied at the operating system or virtual machine level and (depending on workload)
Software recompilation	Poor	Partial to full	Medium to large	Requires recompiling lots of pieces of software

Vulnerability Name(s)/Subname Official Name/Subname			CVE	Affected CPU architectures and mitigations*
				Intel[95]					AMD[96]
				10th gen		9th gen	8th gen**		Zen / Zen+	Zen 2[97]
				Ice Lake[98]	Cascade / Comet / Amber Lake	Coffee Lake[99]	Whiskey Lake	Coffee Lake, Amber Lake
Spectre	v1 Bounds Check Bypass		CVE-2017-5753	Software recompilation[41]
	v2 Branch Target Injection[100]		CVE-2017-5715	Hardware + OS/VMM / Software recompilation		Microcode + ...		Microcode + OS/VMM / Software recompilation		Hardware + OS/VMM / Software recompilation
						Hardware + ...[a]
Meltdown / v3 Rogue Data Cache Load			CVE-2017-5754	Hardware				OS	Not affected
Spectre-NG	v3a Rogue System Register Read		CVE-2018-3640	Hardware	Hardware	Microcode	Microcode	Microcode
					Microcode[b]		Hardware[a]
	v4 Speculative Store Bypass[101]		CVE-2018-3639	[Hardware + OS / ] Software recompilation			...	[Microcode + OS / ] Software recompilation	OS/VMM	Hardware + OS/VMM
							...[a]
	Lazy FP State Restore		CVE-2018-3665	OS/VMM[102]					Not affected
	v1.1 Bounds Check Bypass Store		CVE-2018-3693	Software recompilation[103]
SpectreRSB[104]/ret2spec[105] Return Mispredict			CVE-2018-15572	OS[106]
Foreshadow L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF)[107]	SGX		CVE-2018-3615	Not affected				Microcode	Not affected
	OS/SMM		CVE-2018-3620					Microcode + OS/VMM
	VMM		CVE-2018-3646
Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)[108][109]	RIDL	ZombieLoad Fill Buffer (MFBDS)	CVE-2018-12130					Microcode + OS
		Load Port (MLPDS)	CVE-2018-12127	Hardware	Microcode + OS/VMM[c]
					Hardware[a]
	Fallout Store Buffer (MSBDS)		CVE-2018-12126	Hardware + Microcode[110][111]	Microcode + OS/VMM[c]			Microcode + OS/VMM
				Hardware[a]
	RIDL	Uncacheable Memory (MDSUM)	CVE-2019-11091	Same as the buffer having entries
SWAPGS[112][113][114]			CVE-2019-1125	OS
RIDL (Rogue In-Flight Data Load)	ZombieLoad v2[115][116] TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA)[117][118]		CVE-2019-11135	Hardware[d]	Microcode + OS/VMM	Existing MDS mitigations		Existing MDS mitigations
				TSX not supported[b]		Microcode + OS/VMM[a]
	ZombieLoad/CacheOut L1D Eviction Sampling (L1DES)[119][120][121]		CVE-2020-0549	Not affected	Microcode	Microcode
					Not affected[b]
	Vector Register Sampling (VRS)[120][121]		CVE-2020-0548		Microcode
					Not affected[b]
Load Value Injection (LVI)[122][123][124][125]			CVE-2020-0551		Software recompilation (mainly for Intel SGX)
CROSSTalk[126] Special Register Buffer Data Sampling (SRBDS)[127]			CVE-2020-0543		Microcode[e]	Microcode
					Not affected
Floating Point Value Injection (FPVI)[128][129]			CVE-2021-0086 CVE-2021-26314	Software recompilation
Speculative Code Store Bypass (SCSB)[130][129]			CVE-2021-0089 CVE-2021-26313
Branch History Injection (BHI)[131] and other forms of intra-mode BTI			CVE-2022-0001 CVE-2022-0002	Software recompilation		Not affected		Not affected
						Software recompilation[a]
MMIO Stale Data[132]	Shared Buffers Data Read (SBDR)		CVE-2022-21123	Not affected[f] Microcode + Software recompilation[g]		Microcode + Software recompilation		Software recompilation	Not affected
	Shared Buffers Data Sampling (SBDS)		CVE-2022-21125
	Device Register Partial Write (DRPW)		CVE-2022-21166	Microcode				Existing MDS mitigations
Branch Type Confusion (BTC)[133]	Phantom[134]	BTC-NOBR BTC-DIR	CVE-2022-23825	Not affected					OS/VMM
		BTC-IND							Existing Spectre v2 mitigations
	Retbleed[135][136][137][138] BTC-RET		CVE-2022-29900 CVE-2022-29901	Not affected		OS/VMM		OS/VMM	OS/VMM / Software recompilation
						Not affected[a]
Cross-Thread Return Address Predictions[57][56]			CVE-2022-27672	Not affected					OS/VMM
Zenbleed[139] Cross-Process Information Leak[140][141]			CVE-2023-20593	Not affected						Microcode
Inception[134][61][142] Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO)			CVE-2023-20569	Not affected					OS/VMM
Downfall[64][65] Gather Data Sampling (GDS)[63]			CVE-2022-40982	Microcode					Not affected

* Various CPU microarchitectures not included above are also affected, among them are ARM, IBM Power, MIPS and others.^{[143][144][145][146]}

** The 8th generation Coffee Lake architecture in this table also applies to a wide range of previously released Intel CPUs, not limited to the architectures based on Intel Core, Pentium 4 and Intel Atom starting with Silvermont.^[147][148]

Notes

1. Whiskey Lake stepping C^[95]
   Coffee Lake stepping D
2. Comet Lake except U42 (CPUID 806EC)^[95]
3. Cascade Lake stepping 5^[108]
4. Ice Lake Xeon-SP (CPUID 606A*)^[95]
5. Comet Lake U42
   Amber Lake (CPUID 806EC)^[95]
6. Cascade Lake^[95]
7. Ice Lake Core family (CPUID 706E5)^[95]