Intel Publishes "20231114" CPU Microcode For New Security Advisory & Functional Issues
This Patch Tuesday there are 31 security advisories with 104 CVEs being addressed. Arguably most notable is the INTEL-SA-00950 security advisory. During product development on Sapphire Rapids, a functional bug was discovered. When further evaluating that functional bug, it was determined to be a possible temporary denial of service with exposure too for older platforms. For what was initially classified a CVSS 3.0 rating then was reclassified to CVSS 8.0 (high) after discovering a possible escalation of privilege vector.
Due to that possible escalation of privilege and a 90 day disclosure policy of Google where their researchers also discovered this same issue, SA-00950 is being made public today rather than in early 2024. Thus today's CPU microcode update takes care of mitigating this security vulnerability on affected processors. I was told by Intel in advance there shouldn't be any performance impact from this CPU microcode update and I'll be testing to confirm. Intel is not aware of any active attacks with this vulnerability.
Plus today's batch of CPU microcode updates also fix various "functional issues" on these processors without shedding light on those changes. This ends up meaning new Intel CPU microcode is available today for Rocket Lake S and Tigerlake (Core Gen11) and newer up through Core Gen13 Raptor Lake. On the Xeon side there are new releases for Xeon Scalable 4th Gen Sapphire Rapids, Atom C1100 series, Xeon Scalable 3rd Gen Ice Lake, and Xeon Max.
The new microcode is available for Linux users from GitHub.
Meanwhile AMD has also posted a few security bulletins today as well for Patch Tuesday. Digging through those now.
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