Security News > 2021 > May > New Spectre-Like Attacks

There's new research that demonstrates security vulnerabilities in all of the AMD and Intel chips with micro-op caches, including the ones that were specifically engineered to be resistant to the Spectre/Meltdown attacks of three years ago.

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 from the University of Virginia.

Even though the processor quickly realizes its mistake and does a U-turn to go down the right path, attackers can get at the private data while the processor is still heading in the wrong direction.

It seems really difficult to exploit these vulnerabilities.

We'll need some more analysis before we understand what we have to patch and how.

News URL

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/05/new-spectre-like-attacks.html