Microarchitectural Data Sampling
The Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities are a set of weaknesses in Intel x86 microprocessors that leak data across protection boundaries that are architecturally supposed to be secure. The vulnerabilities have been labeled Fallout, RIDL (Rogue In-Flight Data Load) and ZombieLoad.
Description
The vulnerabilities are in the implementation of speculative execution, which is where the processor tries to guess what instructions may be needed next. They exploit the possibility of reading data buffers found between different parts of the processor.
- Fallout (CVE-2018-12126) — a leak of data being stored from store buffers
- RIDL (CVE-2018-12127, CVE-2018-12130 and CVE-2019-11091) — a leak from various internal processor buffers of data being loaded and stored
- ZombieLoad (CVE-2018-12130) — a leak of already-loaded data from a processor's fill buffer