Security News
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Boffins find if you torture AMD Zen+, Zen 2 CPUs enough, they are vulnerable to Meltdown-like attack
Computer scientists at TU Dresden in Germany have found that AMD's Zen processor family is vulnerable to a data-bothering Meltdown-like attack after all. In a paper [PDF] titled "Transient Execution of Non-Canonical Accesses," released via ArXiv, Saidgani Musaev and Christof Fetzer analyzed AMD Zen+ and Zen 2 chips - namely the Epyc 7262, Ryzen 7 2700X, and the Threadripper 2990WX - and found that they were able to adversely manipulate the operation of the CPU cores.
Microsoft announced today that after investigating other potentially compatible processors for Windows 11, they only found one 7th generation Intel CPU to be compatible, and no first generation AMD Zen CPUs. With the new TPM 2.0 requirement and a restricted list of compatible CPUs, many people found that their devices with Intel 7th generation and first generation AMD Zen CPUs, which run Windows 10 flawlessly, can no longer upgrade to Windows 11.
Microsoft announced today that after investigating other potentially compatible processors for Windows 11, they only found one 7th generation Intel CPU to be compatible, and no AMD Zen CPUs. With the new TPM 2.0 requirement and a restricted list of compatible CPUs, many people found that their devices with Intel 7th generation and AMD Zen CPUs, which run Windows 10 flawlessly, cab no longer upgrade to Windows 11.