Further demonstrating the computational risks of looking into the future, boffins have found another way to abuse speculative execution in Intel CPUs to steal secrets and other data from running applications.
This security shortcoming can be potentially exploited by malicious JavaScript within a web browser tab, or malware running on a system, or rogue logged-in users, to extract passwords, keys, and other data from memory. An attacker therefore requires some kind of foothold in your machine in order to pull this off. The vulnerability, it appears, cannot be easily fixed or mitigated without significant redesign work at the silicon level.
Speculative execution, the practice of allowing processors to perform future work that may or may not be needed while they await the completion of other computations, is what enabled the Spectre vulnerabilities revealed early last year.
In a research paper distributed this month through pre-print service ArXiv, “SPOILER: Speculative Load Hazards Boost Rowhammer and Cache Attacks,” computer scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the US, and the University of Lübeck in Germany, describe a new way to abuse the performance boost.
The researchers – Saad Islam, Ahmad Moghimi, Ida Bruhns, Moritz Krebbel, Berk Gulmezoglu, Thomas Eisenbarth and Berk Sunar – have found that “a weakness in the address speculation of Intel’s proprietary implementation of the memory subsystem” reveals memory layout data, making other attacks like Rowhammer much easier to carry out.
The researchers also examined Arm and AMD processor cores, but found they did not exhibit similar behavior.
“We have discovered a novel microarchitectural leakage which reveals critical information about physical page mappings to user space processes,” the researchers explain.
“The leakage can be exploited by a limited set of instructions, which is visible in all Intel generations starting from the 1st generation of Intel Core processors, independent of the OS and also works from within virtual machines and sandboxed environments.”
Robin Edgar
Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft