Information Disclosure

The kernel packages is vulnerable to information disclosure. Microprocessors use a €˜load port€™ subcomponent to perform load operations from memory or IO. During a load operation, the load port receives data from the memory or IO subsystem and then provides the data to the CPU registers and operations in the CPU€™s pipelines. Stale load operations results are stored in the ‘load port’ table until overwritten by newer operations. Certain load-port operations triggered by an attacker can be used to reveal data about previous stale requests leaking data back to the attacker via a timing side-channel.