Security News > 2021 > March > New Side-Channel Attack Targets Intel CPU Ring Interconnect

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has published a paper detailing a new side-channel attack method that can be launched against devices with Intel CPUs.

Following the disclosure of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities back in January 2018, researchers have increasingly focused on finding CPU side-channel attack methods - and in many cases they have been successful.

The attack, described by the researchers as "The first on-chip, cross-core side-channel attack," is related to the ring interconnect, or ring bus, the component that enables communication between the various CPU units on many Intel processors.

The attack leverages contention - the conflict over access to a shared resource - and involves monitoring ring contention, allowing the attacker to obtain potentially valuable information.

Intel has been informed about this new side-channel attack.

"After reviewing the paper, we believe developers and system administrators can employ a number of security best practices that help protect against various types of side channel attacks, including those found in this paper."

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