Bug 1532127 - firefox: mitigations against spectre via javascript
Summary: firefox: mitigations against spectre via javascript
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Security Response
Classification: Other
Component: vulnerability
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Red Hat Product Security
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks: 1533340 1534345
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2018-01-08 05:05 UTC by Sam Fowler
Modified: 2026-03-02 22:45 UTC (History)
7 users (show)

Fixed In Version: firefox 57.0.4
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2018-01-08 05:09:18 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Sam Fowler 2018-01-08 05:05:17 UTC
Mozilla has issued an advisory (mfsa2018-01) for Firefox 57.0.4 that implements a short term mitigation for spectre based javascript attacks.

CVE-2017-5754 CVE-2017-5753

References:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2018-01/

Comment 5 Tomas Hoger 2018-01-10 13:19:14 UTC
(In reply to Sam Fowler from comment #3)
> "The precision of performance.now() has been reduced from 5μs to 20μs"

According to the following Mozilla blog post:

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-landing-new-class-timing-attack/

this mitigation is going to be include in 52 ESR in version 52.6 ESR.

Comment 6 Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala 2018-01-11 05:33:23 UTC
Statement:

Mozilla has confirmed that similar to "Meltdown" and "Spectre" which are a new class of timing attacks which affect modern CPUs, it is possible to use similar techniques to read private web content between different origins. 

Since this new class of attacks involves measuring precise time intervals, as a partial, short-term, mitigation Mozilla is disabling or reducing the precision of several time sources in Firefox.

Two such sources were identified:

1. Explicit source like "performance.now()".
2. Implicit source like SharedArrayBuffer.

The versions of Mozilla Firefox shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not enable SharedArrayBuffer. Also the first risk factor listed above (namely performance.now()) has a much lower security impact and will be addressed in an upcoming security errata by Mozilla.


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