At arXiv, Singaporean and US researchers have published work, appropriately dubbed “007”, which checks code to see if it’s trying to exploit Spectre; and at Virus Bulletin, Fortinet’s Axelle Apvrille takes a look at the bug from an Android point of view.
Apvrille’s work backs up what we’ve heard from other researchers: so far, Spectre exploitation is theoretical, with no exploits in the wild. She wrote that while there was a flurry of “Spectre exploit” stories based on AV-Test sample collection, it turned out that all of the reported samples were proofs-of-concept rather than genuine malware.
She adds: “there is a significant difference between a PoC of Spectre and a piece of malware using Spectre. Turning a PoC into a malicious executable is far from a trivial process.”
That doesn’t make this kind of work pointless, though, since it’s a good thing to stay ahead of whatever nasties black hats might devise.
In developing a detection technique, Apvrille’s second conclusion was also good news: an attack against Spectre, she found, seems relatively easy to detect.
She wrote that “we had expected several false positives with this signature, but that was not the case: this imperfect signature turns out to be quite good in practice.”
The signature Apvrille searched for (using the in-practice impracticably-slow technique of searching whole binaries) was to identify “Flush+Reload cache attacks in ELF x86-64 executables”.
Source: ‘007’ code helps stop Spectre exploits before they exist • The Register
Robin Edgar
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