Intel and AMD chips are under attack from a new generation of Spectre threats

2 weeks ago

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It seems arsenic Spectre still haunts Intel and AMD processors aft cybersecurity researchers recovered caller moving speculative execution attacks.

To amended their performance, modern processors effort to “guess” what tasks to do next. Speculative execution attacks maltreatment this system to instrumentality nan machine into leaking backstage information, for illustration passwords aliases different delicate data, while it’s moving up of clip connected nan incorrect guesses.

The astir celebrated onslaught was called Spectre - first observed successful early 2018, together pinch a sister vulnerability called Meltdown. At nan time, it was said that astir computers were susceptible to Spectre and Meltdown, and nan consequent unreserved to hole nan flaws made an moreover bigger mess, pinch immoderate computers wholly bricked arsenic a result.

8BASE and Everest

Now, cybersecurity researchers Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi from ETH Zurich declare that years aft Spectre, location are aggregate akin attacks that tin activity astir existing defenses.

Among them are 2 methods that activity connected Linux, and impact a wide scope of Intel processors (Intel’s 12th, 13th, and 14th spot generations for consumers, and 5th and 6th procreation of Xeon processors for servers), and galore AMD chips (Zen 1, Zen 1+, Zen 2).

The attacks undermine nan Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier (IBPB) connected x86 processors, it was explained. IBP is pivotal successful defending against speculative execution attacks.

In nan meantime, nan researchers notified some Intel and AMD of their findings, and some companies person acknowledged nan beingness of nan vulnerabilities. In fact, some said they already discovered them and are moving connected a fix. Intel is search it arsenic CVE-2023-38575, and AMD is search it arsenic CVE-2022-23824. Intel fixed it pinch a firmware update released successful March, but according to BleepingComputer, nan hole has not yet reached each operating systems.

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Via BleepingComputer

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Sead is simply a seasoned freelance journalist based successful Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes astir IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, information breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning much than a decade, he’s written for galore media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s besides held respective modules connected contented penning for Represent Communications.

Source Technology