Security News > 2021 > May > New Attacks Slaughter All Spectre Defenses

All defenses against Spectre side-channel attacks can now be considered broken, leaving billions of computers and other devices just as vulnerable today as they were when the hardware flaw was first announced.

Published on Friday by a team of computer scientists from the University of Virginia and the University of California, San Diego, describes how all modern AMD and Intel chips with micro-op caches are vulnerable to this new line of attack, given that it breaks all defenses.

The new line of attacks exploits the micro-op cache: an on-chip structure that speeds up computing by storing simple commands and allowing the processor to fetch them quickly and early in the speculative execution process, as the team explains in a writeup.

The new lines of attack demolish current defenses because they only protect the processor in a later stage of speculative execution.

According to team member UVA Ph.D. student Logan Moody, the new attacks are going to pour cement shoes onto the feet of modern chips.

Moolchandani told Threatpost that as far as the direct impact of attacks on organizations, end-users and consumers go, the worry will concern attackers' ability to dig secrets out of the nooks and crannies of processors "It would be very difficult to create a focused attack looking for specific information," he said in an email.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/attacks-slaughter-spectre-defenses/165809/