Meltdown-Spectre flaws: Weve found new attack variants, say researchers
Summary
Researchers have developed a tool to uncover new ways of attacking the Meltdown and Spectre CPU side-channel flaws, which may force chipmakers like Intel to re-examine already difficult hardware mitigations.The approach is described in a new paper from Caroline Trippel and Daniel Lustig of Princeton University and Margaret Martonosi from Nvidia called: MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime: Automatically synthesized attacks exploiting invalidation-based coherence protocols.The other type of cache timing side-channel attack the paper explores is Flush+Reload, a technique the researchers who found Spectre used as a side channel in combination with speculative execution.The researchers developed proof-of-concept malware for SpectrePrime and ran it on a MacBook with an Intel Core i7 Processor running a version of macOS Sierra that hadnt received Apples Meltdown and Spectre patches.The out-of-band update disabled Intels mitigation for the Spectre Variant 2 attack, which Microsoft says can cause data loss on top of unexpected reboots.