Security News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a trio of side-channel attacks that could be exploited to leak sensitive data from modern CPUs. "Downfall attacks target a critical weakness found in billions of modern processors used in personal and cloud computers," Daniel Moghimi, senior research scientist at Google, said.

A senior research scientist at Google has devised new CPU attacks to exploit a vulnerability dubbed Downfall that affects multiple Intel microprocessor families and allows stealing passwords, encryption keys, and private data like emails, messages, or banking info from users that share the same computer. Moghimi developed two Downfall attack techniques, Gather Data Sampling - which is also the name Intel uses to refer to the issue and Gather Value Injection - which combines GDS with the Load Value Injection technique disclosed in 2020.

Researchers have discovered a new and powerful transient execution attack called 'Inception' that can leak privileged secrets and data using unprivileged processes on all AMD Zen CPUs, including the latest models. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now combined an older technique named 'Phantom speculation' with a new transient execution attack called 'Training in Transient Execution' to create an even more powerful 'Inception' attack.

A new software-based power side-channel attack called 'Collide+Power' was discovered, impacting almost all CPUs and potentially allowing data to leak. The main concept of Collide+Power is to leak data from measured CPU power consumption values when a data "Collision" between the attacker's dataset and data sent by other applications to overwrite the former happens in CPU cache memory.

Collide+Power vulnerability leaks secrets bit by bit - but could take months or years to learn a useful secret Boffins in Austria and Germany have devised a power-monitoring side-channel attack on...

In Ormandy's Zenbleed bug, now officially known as CVE-2023-20593, the problem arises when an AMD Zen 2 processor performs a special instruction that exists to set multiple so-called vector registers to zero at the same time. Vector registers are used to store data used by special high-performance numeric and data processing instructions, and in most modern Intel and AMD processors they are a chunky 256 bits wide, unlike the 64 bits of the CPU's general purpose registers used for traditional programming purposes.

A team of researchers at Georgia Tech, the University of Michigan, and Ruhr University Bochum have developed a novel attack called "Hot Pixels," which can retrieve pixels from the content displayed in the target's browser and infer the navigation history. Next, the team experimented with data-dependent leakage channels on discreet and integrated GPUs, including Apple's M1 and M2, AMD Radeon RX 6600, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, and Intel Iris Xe. The researchers performed a detailed investigation and characterization of how different processing behaviors could impact observable factors like power consumption, temperature, and frequency and used this data as a foundation to evaluate the "Hot Pixels" attack.

A new side-channel attack impacting multiple generations of Intel CPUs has been discovered, allowing data to be leaked through the EFLAGS register. Instead of relying on the cache system like many other side-channel attacks, this new attack leverages a flaw in transient execution that makes it possible to extract secret data from user memory space through timing analysis.

Nvidia confirmed today that it's working to fix a driver issue causing high CPU usage and blue screens of death on Windows systems. The buggy driver is the GeForce Game Ready 531.18 WHQL driver released on February 28th that introduced support for RTX Video Super Resolution.

Microsoft has released out-of-band security updates for 'Memory Mapped I/O Stale Data' information disclosure vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs.The Mapped I/O side-channel vulnerabilities were initially disclosed by Intel on June 14th, 2022, warning that the flaws could allow processes running in a virtual machine to access data from another virtual machine.