[The Exiled]

Intel Ice Lake CPUs have a System Crashing Bug

Intel CPUs have been rather notorious for system bugs recently. Starting from 2018's Spectre and Meltdown which used speculative execution to exploit systems, the string of new vulnerabilities just continued to this day. Recently we had CrossTalk exploit which represents a threat to cloud providers, where one user could compromise another just by using the same CPU from which the virtual instances are powered. These types of exploits are even more dangerous than ones that require local access, as that is already dangerous by itself. A lot of these issues are said to be ironed out by Intel's new microarchitecture designs like Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, and future revisions.

However, it seems like Intel is encountering some problems with even the latest Ice Lake CPUs when it comes to system bugs. JetBrains, a Czech provider of software development tools has a Java programming language development environment called IntelliJ integrated development environment. It was recently reported that on MacBook Air 2020 and Microsoft Surface Pro models equipped with 10th generation Intel Ice Lake CPUs, IntelliJ IDE causes system restart or a complete OS crash. In the report, the CPU ran in a Linux VM that isolates itself from MacOS so the macOS XNU kernel is not to blame. In the report thread, another user running Windows on Microsoft Surface Pro experienced the crash as well.

Thanks to community testing, we have found out that these issues are not just a software bug, however, it is a rather CPU specific bug that only occurs on Intel Ice Lake processors. Intel recently updated the CPU microcode and there is no improvement. It seems like the IntelliJ IDE has a specific sequence of instructions that trigger Ice Lake CPUs to crash OS. This behavior is concerning as this could be used for a possible exploit. Again, cloud providers are at risk here as if you crash the system the whole instance could crash. Of course server Ice Lake parts are yet to arrive, but the bug could be hidden in the core of the CPU design. Even with the latest microcode update Ice Lake CPUs are still crashing with this software, so we have to see how Intel responds to this.

Izvor: TechPowerUp