Security News > 2020 > November > New side-channel attacks allow access to sensitive data on Intel CPUs

An international team of security researchers is presenting new side-channel attacks, which use fluctuations in software power consumption to access sensitive data on Intel CPUs.

Power side-channel attacks are attacks that exploit fluctuations in power consumption to extract sensitive data such as cryptographic keys.

Because power measurements by malware were previously very inaccurate, such attacks required physical access to the target device and special measurement tools such as an oscilloscope.

New research, led by the Institute of Applied Information Processing and Communications together with the University of Birmingham and the Helmholtz Center for Information Security, shows a method that allows power side-channel attacks that can access sensitive data with unprecedented accuracy - even without physical access.

The team have demonstrated their method can affect devices including desktop PCs, laptops and cloud computing servers from Intel and AMD. "PLATYPUS attacks show that power side channels - which were previously only relevant to small embedded devices like payment cards - are a relevant threat to processors in our laptops and servers. Our work connects the dots between two research areas and highlights that power side channel leakage has much wider relevance than previously thought," said Dr David Oswald, senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of Birmingham.

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