Security News
There will be vulnerabilities that will allow attackers to manipulate or delete data across processes, potentially fatal in the computers controlling our cars or implanted medical devices. The new SGX attacks are known as SGAxe and CrossTalk.
Intel's Software Guard Extensions, known as SGX among friends, consist of a set of instructions for running a secure enclave inside an encrypted memory partition using certain Intel microprocessors. Sadly for Intel and those who depend on its technology, security researchers keep finding flaws in SGX. On Tuesday, two separate sets of boffins published papers describing SGX vulnerabilities, but they're not really quite as bad as is claimed.
The critical flaws exist in Intel's Active Management Technology, which is used for remote out-of-band management of personal computers. The two critical flaws exist in the IPv6 subsystem of AMT. The flaws could potentially enable an unauthenticated user to gain elevated privileges via network access.
Researchers have disclosed the details of a new speculative execution attack affecting many Intel processors, and they say this is the first vulnerability of this kind that allows hackers to obtain sensitive information across the cores of a CPU. The vulnerability was discovered by a team of researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. They initially reported their findings to Intel in September 2018 and nearly one year later they informed the tech giant about the possibility of cross-core leaks.
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two distinct attacks that could be exploited against modern Intel processors to leak sensitive information from the CPU's trusted execution environments. The second line of attack, dubbed CrossTalk by researchers from the VU University Amsterdam, enables attacker-controlled code executing on one CPU core to target SGX enclaves running on a completely different core, and determine the enclave's private keys.
Linus Torvalds has removed a patch in the next release of the Linux kernel intended to provide additional opt-in mitigation of attacks against the L1 data CPU cache. The patch from AWS engineer Balbir Singh was to provide "An opt-in mechanism to flush the L1D cache on context switch. The goal is to allow tasks that are paranoid due to the recent snoop-assisted data sampling vulnerabilities, to flush their L1D on being switched out. This protects their data from being snooped or leaked via side channels after the task has context switched out."
Linus Torvalds has removed a patch in the next release of the Linux kernel intended to provide additional opt-in mitigation of attacks against the L1 data CPU cache. The patch from AWS engineer Balbir Singh was to provide "An opt-in mechanism to flush the L1D cache on context switch. The goal is to allow tasks that are paranoid due to the recent snoop-assisted data sampling vulnerabilities, to flush their L1D on being switched out. This protects their data from being snooped or leaked via side channels after the task has context switched out."
Modern Intel and AMD processors are susceptible to a new form of side-channel attack that makes flush-based cache attacks resilient to system noise, newly published research shared with The Hacker News has revealed. It also works seamlessly against non-Linux Operating Systems, like macOS. "Like any other cache attacks, flush based cache attacks rely on the calibration of cache latency," Biswabandan Panda, assistant professor at IIT Kanpur, told The Hacker News.
Modern Intel and AMD processors are susceptible to a new form of side-channel attack that makes flush-based cache attacks resilient to system noise, newly published research shared with The Hacker News has revealed. It also works seamlessly against non-Linux Operating Systems, like macOS. "Like any other cache attacks, flush based cache attacks rely on the calibration of cache latency," Biswabandan Panda, assistant professor at IIT Kanpur, told The Hacker News.
Intel on Wednesday announced its new 10th Gen Core vPro processors, which include an enhanced version of Hardware Shield that provides advanced threat detection capabilities. According to Intel, its new Core vPro processors are designed to provide better performance, built-in security features, and fast and reliable connectivity with integrated Wi-Fi 6.