Intel CPUs Released in Last 8 Years Impacted by New Zombieload Side-Channel Attack

'Academics have discovered a new class of vulnerabilities in Intel
processors that can allow attackers to retrieve data being processed
inside a CPU. From a report:

The leading attack in this new vulnerability class is a security flaw
named Zombieload, which is another side-channel attack in the same
category as Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow. Just like the first
three, Zombieload is exploited by taking advantage of the speculative
execution process, which is an optimization technique that Intel added
to its CPUs to improve data processing speeds and performance. For
more than a year, academics have been poking holes in various
components of the speculative execution process, revealing ways to
leak data from various CPU buffer zones and data processing
operations. Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow have shown how various
CPU components leak data during the speculative execution process.

Today, an international team of academics -- including some of the
people involved in the original Meltdown and Spectre research -- along
with security researchers from Bitdefender have disclosed a new attack
impacting the speculative execution process. This one is what
researchers have named a Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS)
attack, and targets a CPU's microarchitectural data structures, such
as the load, store, and line fill buffers, which the CPU uses for fast
reads/writes of data being processed inside the CPU. [...] In a
research paper published today, academics say that all Intel CPUs
released since 2011 are most likely vulnerable. Processors for
desktops, laptops, and (cloud) servers are all impacted, researchers
said on a special website they've set up with information about the
Zombieload flaws.'

-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/05/14/1721242

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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