Meltdown Attack Lab
SEED Lab: A Hands-on Lab for Security Education
Overview
Discovered in 2017 and publicly disclosed in January 2018, the Meltdown exploits critical vulnerabilities existing in many modern processors, including those from Intel and ARM. The vulnerabilities allow a user-level program to read data stored inside the kernel memory. Such an access is not allowed by the hardware protection mechanism implemented in most CPUs, but a vulnerability exists in the design of these CPUs that makes it possible to defeat the hardware protection. Because the flaw exists in the hardware, it is very difficult to fundamentally fix the problem, unless we change the CPUs in our computers. The Meltdown vulnerability represents a special genre of vulnerabilities in the design of CPUs. Along with the Spectre vulnerability, they provide an invaluable lesson for security education.
The learning objective of this lab is for students to gain first-hand experiences on the Meltdown attack. The attack itself is quite sophisticated, so we break it down into several small steps, each of which is easy to understand and perform. Once students understand each step, it should not be difficult for them to put everything together to perform the actual attack.
Lab Tasks
- VM version: This lab has been tested on our pre-built SEEDUbuntu16.04 VM.
Recommended Time
- Supervised situation (e.g. a closely-guided lab session):
- Unsupervised situation (e.g. take-home project):
Videos (New)
- This topic is covered in my Udemy course: Computer Security: A Hands-on Approach.
Note
- Meltdown only works against Intel CPU, so if the host machine does not use Intel CPU, the attack in this lab will not work.
- Even if the OS of the host machine is patched, the attack still works, because we did not patch the Linux OS running inside the VM.
Files that are Needed
Suggested Reading
- SEED Book by Wenliang Du
(Book website)
(Chinese version)
- Meltdown and Spectre