CPU Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a trio of side-channel attacks that could be exploited to leak sensitive data from modern CPUs. Called  Collide+Power  ( CVE-2023-20583 ),  Downfall  ( CVE-2022-40982 ), and  Inception  ( CVE-2023-20569 ), the novel methods follow the disclosure of another newly discovered security vulnerability affecting AMD's Zen 2 architecture-based processors known as  Zenbleed  (CVE-2023-20593). "Downfall attacks target a critical weakness found in billions of modern processors used in personal and cloud computers,"  Daniel Moghimi , senior research scientist at Google,  said . "This vulnerability [...] enables a user to access and steal data from other users who share the same computer." In a hypothetical attack scenario, a malicious app installed on a device could weaponize the method to steal sensitive information like passwords and encryption keys, effectively undermining Intel's Software G...

A newly discovered security vulnerability in modern Intel and AMD processors could let remote attackers steal encryption keys via a power side channel attack. Dubbed  Hertzbleed  by a group of researchers from the University of Texas, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Washington, the issue is rooted in dynamic voltage and frequency scaling ( DVFS ), a power and thermal management feature employed to conserve power and reduce the amount of heat generated by a chip. "The cause is that, under certain circumstances, periodic CPU frequency adjustments depend on the current CPU power consumption, and these adjustments directly translate to execution time differences (as 1 hertz = 1 cycle per second)," the researchers said. This can have significant security implications on cryptographic libraries even when implemented correctly as  constant-time code  to prevent timing-based side channels, effectively enabling an attacker to leverage t...

When Spectre, a class of critical vulnerabilities impacting modern processors, was  publicly revealed  in January 2018, the researchers behind the discovery  said , "As it is not easy to fix, it will haunt us for quite some time," explaining the inspiration behind naming the speculative execution attacks. Indeed, it's been more than three years, and there is no end to Spectre in sight. A team of academics from the University of Virginia and University of California, San Diego, have discovered a  new line of attack  that bypasses all current Spectre protections built into the chips, potentially putting almost every system — desktops, laptops, cloud servers, and smartphones — once again at risk just as they were three years ago. The disclosure of  Spectre and Meltdown  opened a  floodgates  of sorts, what with  endless   variants  of the  attacks  coming to light in the intervening years, even as chipmakers like In...