Spectre/Meltdown is back and worse than before

[Progman]

Computer scientists discover new vulnerability affecting computers globally

Date: April 30, 2021

A team of University of Virginia School of Engineering computer science researchers has uncovered a line of attack that breaks all Spectre defenses, meaning that billions of computers and other devices across the globe are just as vulnerable today as they were when Spectre was first announced. The team reported its discovery to international chip makers in April and will present the new challenge at a worldwide computing architecture conference in June.

The researchers, led by Ashish Venkat, William Wulf Career Enhancement Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UVA Engineering, found a whole new way for hackers to exploit something called a "micro-op cache," which speeds up computing by storing simple commands and allowing the processor to fetch them quickly and early in the speculative execution process. Micro-op caches have been built into Intel computers manufactured since 2011.

Paper title: "I See Dead micro-ops: Leaking Secrets via Intel/AMD Micro-Op Caches."  https://www.cs.virginia.edu/venkat/papers/isca2021a.pdf

Edited May 1, 2021 by Progman

[Taitor]

1 hour ago, Progman said:

Computer scientists discover new vulnerability affecting computers globally

Date: April 30, 2021

A team of University of Virginia School of Engineering computer science researchers has uncovered a line of attack that breaks all Spectre defenses, meaning that billions of computers and other devices across the globe are just as vulnerable today as they were when Spectre was first announced. The team reported its discovery to international chip makers in April and will present the new challenge at a worldwide computing architecture conference in June.

The researchers, led by Ashish Venkat, William Wulf Career Enhancement Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UVA Engineering, found a whole new way for hackers to exploit something called a "micro-op cache," which speeds up computing by storing simple commands and allowing the processor to fetch them quickly and early in the speculative execution process. Micro-op caches have been built into Intel computers manufactured since 2011.

Paper title: "I See Dead micro-ops: Leaking Secrets via Intel/AMD Micro-Op Caches."  https://www.cs.virginia.edu/venkat/papers/isca2021a.pdf

Yawn... These vulns are all old news. Many more worse ones left unpatched!

Edited May 1, 2021 by Taitor