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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is the "first native Spectre v2 exploit" against the Linux kernel on Intel systems that could be exploited to read sensitive data from the memory. The exploit, called Native Branch History Injection (BHI), can be used to leak arbitrary kernel memory at 3.5 kB/sec by bypassing existing Spectre v2/BHI mitigations, researchers from Systems and Network Security Group (VUSec) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam  said  in a new study. The shortcoming is being tracked as  CVE-2024-2201 . BHI was  first disclosed  by VUSec in March 2022, describing it as a technique that can get around Spectre v2 protections in modern processors from Intel, AMD, and Arm. While the attack leveraged extended Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPFs), Intel's recommendations to address the problem, among other things, were to disable Linux's unprivileged eBPFs. "Privileged managed runtimes that can be configured to allow an unprivileged user ...

A group of researchers has discovered a new data leakage attack impacting modern CPU architectures supporting speculative execution. Dubbed  GhostRace  ( CVE-2024-2193 ), it is a variation of the transient execution CPU vulnerability known as Spectre v1 (CVE-2017-5753). The approach combines speculative execution and race conditions. "All the common synchronization primitives implemented using conditional branches can be microarchitecturally bypassed on speculative paths using a branch misprediction attack, turning all architecturally race-free critical regions into Speculative Race Conditions (SRCs), allowing attackers to leak information from the target," the researchers  said . The findings from the Systems Security Research Group at IBM Research Europe and VUSec, the latter of which disclosed another side-channel attack called  SLAM  targeting modern processors in December 2023. Spectre refers to a  class of side-channel attacks  that exploit...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...

A group of academics has devised a novel side-channel attack dubbed  iLeakage  that exploits a weakness in the A- and M-series CPUs running on Apple iOS, iPadOS, and macOS devices, enabling the extraction of sensitive information from the Safari web browser. "An attacker can induce Safari to render an arbitrary webpage, subsequently recovering sensitive information present within it using speculative execution," researchers Jason Kim, Stephan van Schaik, Daniel Genkin, and Yuval Yarom  said  in a new study. In a practical attack scenario, the weakness could be exploited using a malicious web page to recover Gmail inbox content and even recover passwords that are autofilled by credential managers. iLeakage, besides being the first case of a  Spectre-style   speculative execution   attack  against Apple Silicon CPUs, also works against all third-party web browsers available for iOS and iPadOS owing to Apple's App Store policy that mandates all b...

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed two new vulnerabilities in Linux-based operating systems that, if successfully exploited, could let attackers circumvent mitigations for speculative attacks such as  Spectre  and obtain sensitive information from kernel memory. Discovered by  Piotr Krysiuk  of Symantec's Threat Hunter team, the flaws — tracked as CVE-2020-27170 and CVE-2020-27171 (CVSS scores: 5.5) — impact all Linux kernels prior to 5.11.8. Patches for the security issues were released on March 20, with Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat deploying fixes for the vulnerabilities in their respective Linux distributions. While  CVE-2020-27170  can be abused to reveal content from any location within the kernel memory,  CVE-2020-27171 can be used to retrieve data from a 4GB range of kernel memory. First documented in January 2018,  Spectre and Meltdown  take advantage of flaws in modern processors to  leak data  that are curr...