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.
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