A new Vulnerability has been discovered on Intel processors by researchers. The security attack uses the speculative execution features of modern processors to leak sensitive information and undermine the security boundaries that operating systems and software erect to protect important data.
The new attack, called BranchScope, has been identified and demonstrated by a team of researchers from the College of William & Mary, University of California Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, and Binghamton University, reports securityweek:
Similar to Meltdown and Spectre, BranchScope can be exploited by an attacker to obtain potentially sensitive information they normally would not be able to access directly. The attacker needs to have access to the targeted system and they must be able to execute arbitrary code. Researchers believe the requirements for such an attack are realistic, making it a serious threat to modern computers, ?on par with other side-channel attacks.? The BranchScope attack has been demonstrated on devices with three types of Intel i5 and i7 CPUs based on Skylake, Haswell and Sandy Bridge microarchitectures. Experts showed that the attack works even if the targeted application is running inside of an Intel SGX enclave. Intel SGX, or Software Guard Extensions, is a hardware-based isolated execution system designed to prevent code and data from getting leaked or modified. BranchScope is similar to Spectre as they both target the directional branch predictors. Branch prediction units (BPUs) are used to improve the performance of pipelined processors by guessing the execution path of branch instructions. The problem is that when two processes are executed on the same physical CPU core, they share a BPU, potentially allowing a malicious process to manipulate the direction of a branch instruction executed by the targeted application.
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