Intel recently released multiple fixes for a high-severity vulnerability dubbed Reptar. The CVE-2023-23583 has a CVSS score of 8.8 and, when exploited, has the potential for privilege escalation, information disclosure, and a denial of service (DoS) condition. The Intel Reptar flaw patch has been released despite there being no evidence of the vulnerability being exploited.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how threat actors could potentially exploit this high severity Intel flaw and Intel’s take on the matter.
Potential Exploits Without The Intel Reptar Flaw Patch
Threat actors could potentially exploit the Reptar vulnerability in CPUs if they have local code execution on the operating system or on a guest virtual machine (VM). Without CPU vulnerability mitigation, this flaw could be exploited for privilege escalation or disclosing confidential information.
Cybercriminals, in a multi-tenant virtualized environment, can also exploit the vulnerability of a guest VM. Such an exploit would cause the host server to crash, resulting in a DoS condition for all users on the server. Organizations, as part of their CPU firmware fixes, should check for BIOS/UEFI updates with their system manufacturers.
Unignored Instruction Prefixes And Reptar
The name “Reptar” for CVE-2023-23583 originates from the “rep” instruction prefix that should be ignored but isn’t. Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher at Google, has unveiled that this high severity Intel flaw can be traced back to the way instruction prefixes on CPUs with fast ..
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