News: 0001582083

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Attack Vector Controls Can Now Manage VMSCAPE Mitigation

([Linux Security] 69 Minutes Ago Attack Vector Controls + VMSCAPE)


Made public and mitigated within the mainline Linux kernel last month was the [1]VMSCAPE vulnerability affecting both AMD and Intel CPUs . Now merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel is adding VMSCAPE to the recently-introduced Attack Vector Controls functionality.

[2]Attack Vector Controls was merged in Linux 6.17 as [3]a new means of controlling Linux CPU security vulnerability mitigations . With Attack Vector Controls you just need to manage the system/server use-cases and in turn the classes of possible CPU security attacks (such as VM usage with guest to host attacks or cross-VM untrusted scenarios) rather than managing CPU mitigation options individually.

With Linux 6.18, VMSCAPE is now covered by the Attack Vector Controls support. VMSCAPE mitigations are applied with Attack Vector Controls just for those concerned about guest-to-host attack vectors.

This support was merged via the [4]x86/bugs pull .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-VMSCAPE

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Attack+Vector+Controls

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Attack-Vector-Controls-6.17

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250926101136.GAaNZm2JLV-DqtF1IC@fat_crate.local/



kylew77

"I knew then (in 1970) that a 4-kbyte minicomputer would cost as much as
a house. So I reasoned that after college, I'd have to live cheaply in
an apartment and put all my money into owning a computer."
-- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, EE Times, June 6, 1988, pg 45