A new attack slips past the latest defenses built into your computer's processor | MIT CSAIL
www.csail.mit.edu

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1320015/spectre-is-back-cpu-mitigations-found-to-be-ineffective

Modern processors are fast in part because they guess. Rather than waiting to find out which way a program will branch, a chip predicts the likely path and races ahead. When the guess is right, time is saved. When it’s wrong, the work is discarded, but traces of it linger, and since the Spectre vulnerability was disclosed in 2018, attackers have known how to read those traces to pull secrets out of memory they should never see.

  • urushitan 漆たん@kakera.kintsugi.moeEnglish
    0·
    3 hours ago

    Trujillo and Yan notified AMD and Intel in early February and reached Linux kernel maintainers in March, coordinating with AMD to warn cloud providers and other downstream customers. AMD then released a patch that mitigates the attack, which can be obtained by updating your operating system. Their code is publicly available.

    So the header should really be “Intel still vulnerable to SPECTRE-like attack disclosed in January”