Security News > 2024 > April > Researchers unveil novel attack methods targeting Intel’s conditional branch predictor

Researchers have found two novel types of attacks that target the conditional branch predictor found in high-end Intel processors, which could be exploited to compromise billions of processors currently in use.

The new paper, "Pathfinder: High-Resolution Control-Flow Attacks Exploiting the Conditional Branch Predictor," details two novel attacks that could compromise the billions of Intel processors in use.

They discover a unique attack that is the first to target a feature in the branch predictor called the Path History Register, which tracks both branch order and branch addresses.

As a result, more information with more precision is exposed than with prior attacks that lacked insight into the exact structure of the branch predictor.

"While prior attacks could misdirect a single branch or the first instance of a branch executed multiple times, we now have such precise control that we could misdirect the 732nd instance of a branch taken thousands of times," added Tullsen.

"Pathfinder can reveal the outcome of almost any branch in almost any victim program, making it the most precise and powerful microarchitectural control-flow extraction attack that we have seen so far," said Kazem Taram, an assistant professor of computer science at Purdue University and a UC San Diego computer science PhD graduate.

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https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2024/04/29/intel-processors-novel-attacks/