Newly Discovered Variants Of Meltdown/Spectre Exploit Cache Coherency Across Cores

[Guest]

Researchers created a new method of exploiting the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, which they’ve dubbed MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime.

Newly Discovered Variants Of Meltdown/Spectre Exploit Cache Coherency Across Cores : Read more

 

[InvalidError]

Now that security researchers are focusing on side-channel style attacks, I bet these are only the tip of the iceberg for architectural side-channel discoveries and we'll likely see more of those as the research field expands to more architectures and more aspects of each of them.

 

[meyers.bt]

This is nothing new. They've been studying side-channel attacks for ages. People have already forgotten this gem from 2005: http://www.daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf

 

[bit_user]

This is nothing new. They've been studying side-channel attacks for ages. People have already forgotten this gem from 2005: http://www.daemonology.net/papers/htt.pdf

Was it forgotten? I remember reading that Intel was initially skeptical of it, but I've since seen thread QoS and isolation features go into server CPUs I thought were intended to mitigate against it.

 

[meyers.bt]

BIT_USER, I said that in regard to the previous comment because they seemed to be under the impression that we were only just beginning to take side-channel attacks in CPU designs seriously. You are absolutely correct in that Colin's particular exploit has long since been remedied in hardware. I was merely using it as an example of how exploits like this are not really all that new, just far more sophisticated than their predecessors.

 

[InvalidError]

BIT_USER, I said that in regard to the previous comment because they seemed to be under the impression that we were only just beginning to take side-channel attacks in CPU designs seriously.

I know side-channel attacks aren't new, some people have also made side-channel attacks by monitoring power draw and EMI from chips too. Nearly 15 years between significant architecturally exploitable side-channels however is a surprisingly long time between discoveries for bugs that have been there all along, hence my impression that research in that direction landed on the back-burner for much of that time.

Now that the spotlight has been brought back onto them with Spectre, Meltdown and a new set of closely variants thereof mere months after the original disclosures, AMD, Intel and ARM have the whole security community scrutinizing their instruction set and architecture for new security holes to a likely unprecedented degree.

 

[apesoccer]

I like pie.