Windows 10: All Intel chips open to new Spoiler non-Spectre attack

Grom0X · Mar 5, 2019

Researchers have discovered a new flaw affecting all Intel chips due to the way they carry out speculative execution for CPU performance gains.

Like the Spectre and Meltdown attacks revealed in January 2018, Spoiler also abuses speculative execution in Intel chips to leak secrets.

However, it targets a different area of the processor called the Memory Order Buffer, which is used to manage memory operations and is tightly coupled with the cache.

Researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, and the University of Lübeck in north Germany detail the attack in a new paper, 'Spoiler: Speculative load hazards boost Rowhammer and cache attacks'. The paper was released this month and spotted by The Register.

The researchers explain that Spoiler is not a Spectre attack, so it is not affected by Intel's mitigations for it, which otherwise can prevent other Spectre-like attacks such as SplitSpectre.

"The root cause for Spoiler is a weakness in the address speculation of Intel's proprietary implementation of the memory subsystem, which directly leaks timing behavior due to physical address conflicts. Existing Spectre mitigations would therefore not interfere with Spoiler," they write...
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Read more: All Intel chips open to new Spoiler non-Spectre attack: Don't expect a quick fix | ZDNet

More: SPOILER alert, literally: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability The Register

:)

Brink · Mar 5, 2019

Intel chips with built-in Meltdown and Spectre protections later 2018

Intel expects to begin shipping its first chips with built-in protection against the Meltdown and Spectre attacks later this year, company CEO Brian Krzanich said Wednesday.

The company has "assigned some of our very best minds" to work on addressing the vulnerability that's exploited by those attacks, Krzanich said on a conference call following Intel's quarterly earnings announcement. That will result in "silicon-based" changes to the company's future chips, he said.

"We've been working around clock" to address the vulnerability and attacks, Krzanich said. But, he added, "we're acutely aware we have more to do."

The Spectre and Meltdown attacks exploit a feature called speculative execution that's present in nearly all the chips Intel has made over the last 20 years. The Meltdown attack also affects chips from AMD and those based on ARM designs and, in turn, nearly every PC, smartphone and tablet made in recent years. The attacks, which were made public earlier this month, could allow malicious actors to get access to secret data stored on computers, including passwords...
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Read more: Intel says new, Spectre- and Meltdown-proof chips coming this year - Business Insider

dlwmacgregor · Mar 5, 2019

Intel chips with built-in Meltdown and Spectre protections later 2018

Read more: Intel says new, Spectre- and Meltdown-proof chips coming this year - Business Insider
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Didn't AMD say that their CPUs are NOT vulnerable to Meltdown?

Brink · Mar 5, 2019

Researchers discover seven new Meltdown and Spectre attacks

A team of nine academics has revealed today seven new CPU attacks. The seven impact AMD, ARM, and Intel CPUs to various degrees.

Two of the seven new attacks are variations of the Meltdown attack, while the other five are variations on the original Spectre attack --two well-known attacks that have been revealed at the start of the year and found to impact CPUs models going back to 1995.

Researchers say they've discovered the seven new CPU attacks while performing "a sound and extensible systematization of transient execution attacks" --a catch-all term the research team used to describe attacks on the various internal mechanisms that a CPU uses to process data, such as the speculative execution process, the CPU's internal caches, and other internal execution stages.

The research team says they've successfully demonstrated all seven attacks with proof-of-concept code. Experiments to confirm six other Meltdown-attacks did not succeed, according to a graph published by researchers.

Image: Canella et al.

The seven new CPU attacks are detailed below, with the relevant information published by researchers in a paper they've released earlier today...
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Read more: Researchers discover seven new Meltdown and Spectre attacks | ZDNet

Windows 10: All Intel chips open to new Spoiler non-Spectre attack

All Intel chips open to new Spoiler non-Spectre attack

All Intel chips open to new Spoiler non-Spectre attack

All Intel chips open to new Spoiler non-Spectre attack

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