Security News

New Google Chrome feature reduces CPU use to extend battery life
2022-07-10 15:05

Google is testing a new 'Quick Intensive Throttling' feature that reduces CPU time by 10%, extending the battery life for laptops and mobile devices. In Chrome 87, Google introduced a new feature called 'Intensive Wake Up Throttling' that prevents JavaScript from waking up a tab more than once a minute after it has been suspended and hidden from view for more than 5 minutes.

New Hertzbleed Side Channel Attack Affects All Modern AMD and Intel CPUs
2022-06-15 20:12

A newly discovered security vulnerability in modern Intel and AMD processors could let remote attackers steal encryption keys via a power side channel attack. This can have significant security implications on cryptographic libraries even when implemented correctly as constant-time code to prevent timing-based side channels, effectively enabling an attacker to leverage the execution time variations to extract sensitive information such as cryptographic keys.

New Hertzbleed side-channel attack affects Intel, AMD CPUs
2022-06-14 19:55

A new side-channel attack known as Hertzbleed allows remote attackers to steal full cryptographic keys by observing variations in CPU frequency enabled by dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. "In the worst case, these attacks can allow an attacker to extract cryptographic keys from remote servers that were previously believed to be secure. [.] Hertzbleed is a real, and practical, threat to the security of cryptographic software," the security researchers explain.

MIT Researchers Discover New Flaw in Apple M1 CPUs That Can't Be Patched
2022-06-13 23:59

It leverages "Speculative execution attacks to bypass an important memory protection mechanism, ARM Pointer Authentication, a security feature that is used to enforce pointer integrity," MIT researchers Joseph Ravichandran, Weon Taek Na, Jay Lang, and Mengjia Yan said in a new paper. The vulnerability is rooted in pointer authentication codes, a line of defense introduced in arm64e architecture that aims to detect and secure against unexpected changes to pointers - objects that store a memory address - in memory.

New PACMAN hardware attack targets Macs with Apple M1 CPUs
2022-06-10 19:15

A new hardware attack targeting Pointer Authentication in Apple M1 CPUs with speculative execution enables attackers to gain arbitrary code execution on Mac systems. Discovered by researchers at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, this new class of attack would allow threat actors with physical access to Macs with Apple M1 CPUs to access the underlying filesystem.

AMD confirms GPU driver bug overclocks CPUs without permission
2022-04-06 13:53

AMD is investigating an issue in its GPU software suite that causes an auto-adjustment of AMD Ryzen CPU performance settings for users without permission. The chipmaker confirmed the GPU driver bug to Tom's Hardware via a generic statement that didn't give many details, mitigation advice, or estimated fix dates.

New Exploit Bypasses Existing Spectre-V2 Mitigations in Intel, AMD, Arm CPUs
2022-03-12 22:10

Researchers have disclosed a new technique that could be used to circumvent existing hardware mitigations in modern processors from Intel, AMD, and Arm and stage speculative execution attacks such as Spectre to leak sensitive information from host memory.Attacks like Spectre are designed to break the isolation between different applications by taking advantage of an optimization technique called speculative execution in CPU hardware implementations to trick programs into accessing arbitrary locations in memory and thus leak their secrets.

Intel, AMD, Arm warn of new speculative execution CPU bugs
2022-03-09 17:03

Security researchers have found new a new way to bypass existing hardware-based defenses for speculative execution in modern computer processors from Intel, AMD, and Arm. Today, the three CPU manufacturers have published advisories accompanied by mitigation updates and security recommendations to tackle recently discovered issues that allow leaking of sensitive information despite isolation-based protections.

Researchers Break Intel SGX With New 'SmashEx' CPU Attack Technique
2021-10-20 06:27

The vulnerability was discovered by a group of academics from ETH Zurich, the National University of Singapore, and the Chinese National University of Defense Technology in early May 2021, who used it to stage a confidential data disclosure attack called "SmashEx" that can corrupt private data housed in the enclave and break its integrity. Introduced with Intel's Skylake processors, SGX allows developers to run selected application modules in a completely isolated secure compartment of memory, called an enclave or a Trusted Execution Environment, which is designed to be protected from processes running at higher privilege levels like the operating system.

Windows 11 build 22000.282 fixes CPU performance issues, taskbar bug
2021-10-16 16:49

282 yesterday with fixes for AMD CPU performance issues and a bug that displayed the Windows 10 taskbar. This build is available to Windows Insiders in the Beta and Release channels and fixes a long list of bugs plaguing users since Windows 11 was released.