Intel | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

More than six years after the Spectre security flaw impacting modern CPU processors came to light, new research has found that the latest AMD and Intel processors are still susceptible to speculative execution attacks. The attack, disclosed by ETH Zürich researchers Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi, aims to undermine the Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier ( IBPB ) on x86 chips, a crucial mitigation against speculative execution attacks. Speculative execution refers to a performance optimization feature wherein modern CPUs execute certain instructions out-of-order by predicting the branch a program will take beforehand, thus speeding up the task if the speculatively used value was correct. If it results in a misprediction, the instructions, called transient, are declared invalid and squashed, before the processor can resume execution with the correct value. While the execution results of transient instructions are not committed to the architectural program state, it's still ...

Modern CPUs from Intel, including Raptor Lake and Alder Lake, have been found vulnerable to a new side-channel attack that could be exploited to leak sensitive information from the processors. The attack, codenamed Indirector by security researchers Luyi Li, Hosein Yavarzadeh, and Dean Tullsen, leverages shortcomings identified in Indirect Branch Predictor (IBP) and the Branch Target Buffer (BTB) to bypass existing defenses and compromise the security of the CPUs. "The Indirect Branch Predictor (IBP) is a hardware component in modern CPUs that predicts the target addresses of indirect branches," the researchers noted . "Indirect branches are control flow instructions whose target address is computed at runtime, making them challenging to predict accurately. The IBP uses a combination of global history and branch address to predict the target address of indirect branches." The idea, at its core, is to identify vulnerabilities in IBP to launch precise Branch T...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Researchers have discovered two novel attack methods targeting high-performance Intel CPUs that could be exploited to stage a key recovery attack against the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. The techniques have been collectively dubbed  Pathfinder  by a group of academics from the University of California San Diego, Purdue University, UNC Chapel Hill, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Google. "Pathfinder allows attackers to read and manipulate key components of the branch predictor, enabling two main types of attacks: reconstructing program control flow history and launching high-resolution Spectre attacks," Hosein Yavarzadeh, the lead author of the  paper , said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "This includes extracting secret images from libraries like libjpeg and recovering encryption keys from AES through intermediate value extraction." Spectre is the name given to a  class of side-channel attacks ...

A security flaw impacting the Lighttpd web server used in baseboard management controllers ( BMCs ) has remained unpatched by device vendors like Intel and Lenovo, new findings from Binarly reveal. While the original shortcoming was  discovered and patched  by the Lighttpd maintainers way back in August 2018 with  version 1.4.51 , the lack of a CVE identifier or an advisory meant that it was overlooked by developers of AMI MegaRAC BMC, ultimately ending up in products made by Intel and Lenovo. Lighttpd  (pronounced "Lighty") is an open-source high-performance web server software designed for speed, security, and flexibility, while optimized for high-performance environments without consuming a lot of system resources. The silent fix for Lighttpd concerns an out-of-bounds read vulnerability that could be exploited to exfiltrate sensitive data, such as process memory addresses, thereby allowing threat actors to bypass crucial security mechanisms like address space ...

Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam have disclosed a new side-channel attack called  SLAM  that could be exploited to leak sensitive information from kernel memory on current and upcoming CPUs from Intel, AMD, and Arm. The attack is an end-to-end exploit for Spectre based on a new feature in Intel CPUs called  Linear Address Masking  ( LAM ) as well as its analogous counterparts from AMD (called  Upper Address Ignore  or  UAI ) and Arm (called  Top Byte Ignore  or  TBI ). "SLAM exploits unmasked gadgets to let a userland process leak arbitrary ASCII kernel data," VUSec researchers  said , adding it could be leveraged to leak the root password hash within minutes from kernel memory. While LAM is presented as a security feature, the study found that it ironically degrades security and "dramatically" increases the  Spectre attack surface , resulting in a transient execution attack, which exploits  speculati...

Intel has released fixes to close out a high-severity flaw codenamed  Reptar  that impacts its desktop, mobile, and server CPUs. Tracked as  CVE-2023-23583  (CVSS score: 8.8), the  issue  has the potential to "allow escalation of privilege and/or information disclosure and/or denial of service via local access." Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could also permit a bypass of the CPU's security boundaries, according to Google Cloud, which described it as an issue stemming from how redundant prefixes are interpreted by the processor. "The impact of this vulnerability is demonstrated when exploited by an attacker in a multi-tenant virtualized environment, as the exploit on a guest machine causes the host machine to crash resulting in a Denial of Service to other guest machines running on the same host," Google Cloud's Phil Venables  said . "Additionally, the vulnerability could potentially lead to information disclosure or privilege escal...

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...

The threat actors behind the ransomware attack on Taiwanese PC maker MSI last month have leaked the company's private code signing keys on their dark website. "Confirmed, Intel OEM private key leaked, causing an impact on the entire ecosystem," Alex Matrosov, founder and CEO of firmware security firm Binarly,  said  in a tweet over the weekend. "It appears that Intel Boot Guard may not be effective on certain devices based on the 11th Tiger Lake, 12th Adler Lake, and 13th Raptor Lake." Present in the leaked data are firmware image signing keys associated with 57 PCs and private signing keys for Intel Boot Guard used on 116 MSI products. The Boot Guard keys from MSI are believed to impact several device vendors, including Intel, Lenovo and Supermicro. Intel Boot Guard is a  hardware-based security technology  that's designed to protect computers against executing tampered UEFI firmware. The development comes a month after MSI  fell victim  to a double...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday  added  three flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active abuse in the wild. Included among the three is  CVE-2022-24990 , a bug affecting TerraMaster network-attached storage (TNAS) devices that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution with the highest privileges. Details about the flaw were  disclosed  by Ethiopian cyber security research firm Octagon Networks in March 2022. The vulnerability, according to a  joint advisory  released by U.S. and South Korean government authorities, is said to have been weaponized by North Korean nation-state hackers to strike healthcare and critical infrastructure entities with ransomware. The second shortcoming to be added to KEV catalog is  CVE-2015-2291 , an unspecified flaw in the Intel ethernet diagnostics driver for Windows (IQVW32.sys and IQVW64.sys) that could throw an a...

Chipmaker Intel has confirmed that proprietary source code related to its Alder Lake CPUs has been leaked, following its release by an unknown third-party on 4chan and GitHub last week. The published content contains Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) code for  Alder Lake , the company's 12th generation processors that was originally launched in November 2021. In a statement shared with Tom's Hardware, Intel  said  the leak doesn't expose "any new security vulnerabilities as we do not rely on obfuscation of information as a security measure." It's also encouraging the broader security research community to report any potential issues through its  bug bounty program , adding it's reaching out to customers to notify them of the matter. Besides the UEFI code, the leaked data dump includes a plethora of files and tools, some of which appear to come from firmware vendor Insyde Software. Exact details surrounding the nature of the hack, inclu...

A group of researchers has revealed details of a new vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs that enables attackers to obtain encryption keys and other secret information from the processors. Dubbed  ÆPIC Leak , the weakness is the first-of-its-kind to architecturally disclose sensitive data in a manner that's akin to an "uninitialized memory read in the CPU itself." "In contrast to transient execution attacks like  Meltdown and Spectre ,  ÆPIC Leak  is an architectural bug: the sensitive data gets directly disclosed without relying on any (noisy) side channel," the academics said. The study was conducted by researchers from the Sapienza University of Rome, the Graz University of Technology, Amazon Web Services, and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. The vulnerability ( CVE-2022-21233 , CVSS score: 6.0), which affects CPUs with Sunny Cover microarchitecture, is rooted in a component called Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller ( APIC ), wh...

With speculative execution attacks remaining a stubbornly persistent vulnerability ailing modern processors, new research has highlighted an "industry failure" to adopt mitigations released by AMD and Intel, posing a firmware supply chain threat. Dubbed  FirmwareBleed  by Binarly, the information leaking assaults stem from the continued exposure of microarchitectural attack surfaces on the part of enterprise vendors either as a result of not correctly incorporating the fixes or only using them partially. "The impact of such attacks is focused on disclosing the content from privileged memory (including protected by virtualization technologies) to obtain sensitive data from processes running on the same processor (CPU)," the firmware protection firm  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Cloud environments can have a greater impact when a physical server can be shared by multiple users or legal entities." In recent years, implementations of sp...

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...

Researchers have disclosed a new technique that could be used to circumvent existing hardware mitigations in modern processors from Intel, AMD, and Arm, and stage  speculative execution  attacks such as Spectre to leak sensitive information from host memory. Attacks like  Spectre  are designed to break the isolation between different applications by taking advantage of an  optimization technique  called speculative execution in CPU hardware implementations to trick programs into accessing arbitrary locations in memory and thus leak their secrets. While chipmakers have incorporated both software and hardware  defenses , including  Retpoline  as well as safeguards like Enhanced Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation ( eIBRS ) and  Arm   CSV2 , the latest method demonstrated by VUSec researchers aims to get around all these protections. Called  Branch History Injection  (BHI or Spectre-BHB), it's a new variant of Spectr...

A new research has yielded yet another means to pilfer sensitive data by exploiting what's the first "on-chip, cross-core" side-channel attack targeting the ring interconnect used in Intel Coffee Lake and Skylake processors. Published by a group of academics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the  findings  are expected to be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium coming this August. While information leakage attacks targeting the CPU microarchitecture have been previously demonstrated to break the isolation between user applications and the operating system, allowing a malicious program to access memory used by other programs (e.g., Meltdown and Spectre), the new attack leverages a contention on the ring interconnect. SoC  Ring interconnect  is an on-die bus arranged in a ring topology which enables intra-process communication between different components (aka agents) such as the cores, the last level cache (LLC), the graphics unit, and the...

Intel and Cybereason have partnered to build anti-ransomware defenses into the chipmaker's newly announced 11th generation Core  vPro  business-class processors. The hardware-based security enhancements are baked into Intel's vPro platform via its  Hardware Shield  and  Threat Detection Technology  (TDT), enabling profiling and detection of ransomware and other threats that have an impact on the CPU performance. "The joint solution represents the first instance where PC hardware plays a direct role in ransomware defenses to better protect enterprise endpoints from costly attacks," Cybereason  said . Exclusive to vPro, Intel Hardware Shield provides protections against firmware-level attacks targeting the  BIOS , thereby ensuring that the operating system (OS) runs on legitimate hardware as well as minimizing the risk of malicious code injection by locking down memory in the BIOS when the software is running to help prevent planted malware fro...

It appears there is no end in sight to the hardware level security vulnerabilities in Intel processors, as well as to the endless 'performance killing' patches that resolve them. Modern Intel CPUs have now been found vulnerable to a new attack that involves reversely exploiting Meltdown-type data leak vulnerabilities to bypass existing defenses, two separate teams of researchers told The Hacker News. Tracked as CVE-2020-0551 , dubbed " Load Value Injection in the Line Fill Buffers" or LVI-LFB for short, the new speculative-execution attack could let a less privileged attacker steal sensitive information—encryption keys or passwords—from the protected memory and subsequently, take significant control over a targeted system. According to experts at Bitdefender and academic researchers from a couple of universities, the new attack is particularly devastating in multi-tenant environments such as enterprise workstations or cloud servers in the datacenter. And...