SWAPGS Vulnerability in Modern CPUs Fixed in Windows, Linux, ChromeOS

At BlackHat today, Bitdefender disclosed a new variant of the Spectre 1 speculative execution side channel vulnerabilities that could allow a malicious program to access and read the contents of privileged memory in an operating system.

This SWAPGS vulnerability allows local programs, like malware, to read data from memory that is should normally not have access to, such as the Windows or Linux kernel memory.

Andrei Vlad Lutas of Bitdefender discovered this vulnerability while performing research on CPU internals and reported it to Intel in August 2018.

In a statement from Intel, BleepingComputer was told that after the vulnerability was disclosed to them, they descided to address this on a software level and Microsoft took over coordination of the vulnerability.