Security News > 2022 > August > ÆPIC and SQUIP Vulnerabilities Found in Intel and AMD Processors

A group of researchers has revealed details of a new vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs that enables attackers to obtain encryption keys and other secret information from the processors.

"The scan of the I/O address space on Intel CPUs based on the Sunny Cove microarchitecture revealed that the memory-mapped registers of the local Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller are not properly initialized," the researchers noted.

"By protecting selected code and data from modification, developers can partition their application into hardened enclaves or trusted execution modules to help increase application security," Intel explains about the security assurances offered by SGX. The flaw, put simply, breaks the aforementioned guarantees, enabling an attacker with permissions to execute privileged native code on a target machine to extract the private keys, and worse defeat attestation, a cornerstone of the security primitives used in SGX to ensure the integrity of code and data.

In response to the findings, Intel has released firmware updates, while describing the issue as a medium-severity vulnerability related to improper isolation of shared resources, leading to information disclosure via local access.

It's also worth noting that Intel has since deprecated support for SGX for its client CPUs, what with a litany of attack methods plaguing the technology, including SGX-ROP, MicroScope, Plundervolt, Load Value Injection, SGAxe, and VoltPillager.

The development comes as researchers demonstrated what's the first-ever side channel attack on scheduler queues impacting AMD Zen 1, Zen 2, and Zen 3 microarchitectures that could be abused by an adversary to recover RSA keys.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/08/pic-and-squip-vulnerabilities-found-in.html