Security Intel BranchScope Side Channel Attack Vulnerability

eva2000 · Mar 28, 2018

Intel cpus have a new side channel attack security vulnerability called BranchScope. We're still dealing with Meltdown & Spectre too !

BranchScope Info Links

After Meltdown and Spectre, Intel CPUs Are Now Vulnerable to BranchScope Attacks - Updated

BranchScope: Your Intel CPUs Are Vulnerable To New Spectre-Like Attack

As predicted, more branch prediction processor attacks are discovered

Researchers from the College of William and Mary, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California Riverside, and Binghamton University have described a security attack that 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.
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The Spectre attacks, published earlier this year, take advantage of the speculative execution features of modern processors to leak sensitive information. The new attack, named BranchScope by the researchers, shares some similarity with variant 2 of the Spectre attack, as both BranchScope and Spectre 2 take advantage of the behavior of the processor's branch predictor.
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Update: in a statement, Intel says: We have been working with these researchers and we have determined the method they describe is similar to previously known side channel exploits. We anticipate that existing software mitigations for previously known side channel exploits, such as the use of side channel resistant cryptography, will be similarly effective against the method described in this paper. We believe close partnership with the research community is one of the best ways to protect customers and their data, and we are appreciative of the work from these researchers.
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Sandy Bridge, Haswell, and Skylake processors affected

The researchers have demonstrated the BranchScope attack on three recent Intel Core i5 and Core i7 x86_64 (64-bit) processor families, including Sandy Bridge, Haswell, and Skylake. The worst part of these attacks is that BranchScope can be extended, offering attackers additional tools to perform more advanced and flexible attacks that target even applications running inside Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) enclaves.
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eva2000 · Mar 30, 2018

Intel shrugs off ‘new’ side-channel attacks on branch prediction units and SGX

Intel’s shrugged off two new allegations of design flaws that enable side-channel attacks.

One of the new allegations was discussed at Black Hat Asia in Singapore last week, where University of Graz PhD Students Moritz Lipp and Michael Schwarz delivered a talk titled “When good turns to evil: using Intel SGX to stealthily steal Bitcoins.”
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