Intellij software causes operating system crash ONLY Intel Ice Lake processors
Lately, Intel processors have been more talked about for their problems than for aspects like performance. Since the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities appeared in 2018, the trickle of vulnerabilities hasn't stopped. The latest is CrossTalk, a recently reported vulnerability, and it's not the last. It seems that JetBrains, a Czech software vendor, has a Java tool called IntelliJ that causes the operating system to crash.
The vulnerabilities to date are quite disparate, with some being 'easy' to exploit and others not. CacheOut is difficult to exploit because it requires physical access to the hardware, but Specter and Meltdown would be 'easy' to exploit. On the other hand, processors like Ice Lake, Tiger Lake and future versions already introduce corrections at the hardware level.
[amazon box="B07Y8RH66Y"]Intellij, the tool that exploits Intel vulnerabilities
JetBrais is a Czech provider of software development tools that has a Java-based development environment. This integrated development environment is called Intellij. The Intellij tool has the ability to restart or crash the operating system on systems based on Ice Lake processors. A tool tested on the 2020 MacBook Air and Microsoft Surface Pro.
According to the report, the processor runs a virtual machine on Linux that is isolated from macOS. This makes the kernel of macOS XNU have nothing to do with what happened. The report highlights that a user with a Microsoft Surface Pro also experienced the same problem.
After this, different investigations have been carried out by the community. Such issues are not simply a software bug, it is a very specific bug that only affects Ice Lake processors. Intel would have updated the microcode for these processors, without correcting the problem.
It seems that the Intellij IDE would have a sequence of instructions that causes the Ice Lake CPUs to generate a failure in the operating system. Although it is not known how it could be exploited, it could generate some kind of exploit.
Ice Lake processors are currently available for laptops and not for desktops or servers. This is good, because Intel would have the ability to correct or mitigate this vulnerability. There is no more information on how Intellij would be generating this failure.
Source: TPU
