Researchers from Ath Zurich have highlighted a new class of weaknesses associated with Intel processors. He was able to bypass Intel’s rescue against the speaker.
The speaker is a class of weaknesses that were originally identified in 2018, as well as with meltdown, a uniform exploitation that affects AMD chips. These flaws exploited speculative execution, which in turn leaked the data. Although the weaknesses were patched 7 years ago, Microsoft issued a registry security mitigation a year ago to protect from vulnerability.
As it is revealed, the speaker has been revived in a new personality. Researchers in Eth Zurich have labeled data-letters as a branch prediction race (BPRC). These weaknesses mainly affect the Intel CPU from the 9th generation (Coffee Lake Refresh) to the 7th generation (Kabi Lake).
Researches stated that branch predictions on the Intel processor are updated as persuasion inside the processor pipeline, resulting in a possible race position. In such a scenario, two or more procedures or threads can try and update the same information concurrently, and this can cause chaos. They discovered that an exploitation was possible where a processor switchs the privilege levels, such as from the user to the kernel, while the branch prophet updates are still in the flight. This can give birth to a new attack vector, the Spctor V2, which thanks unauthorized code injections for elevated privileges. Safety experts IT Branch Privileage Injection (BPI). These issues affect all types of computers, from PCs to Server in data centers.
Here is described how the issue was described: “We can use vulnerability to read the entire content of buffer memory (cash) of the processor and the entire content of the working memory (RAM) of any other user of the same CPU.”
The discovery by the Swiss team indicates that there is a performance effect, up to 2.7 percent overhead for microcode mitigation on Elder Lake, although Intel remains to comment on the issue.
Intel has released one Microcode update To address the new defect, which is designated as CVE-2024–45332. The indirect branch prophet advisor explains the issue as follows: Possible security weaknesses in some Intel® processors may allow indirect branch prophet information disclosure. Intel is releasing microids updates to reduce these potential weaknesses.
It is worth noting that AMD and ARM products are not affected by this new exploitation.
Source: register, Eth zurich
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