speculative side-channel attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A team of security researchers has discovered another serious side-channel vulnerability in Intel CPUs that could allow an attacker to sniff out sensitive protected data, like passwords and cryptographic keys, from other processes running in the same CPU core with simultaneous multi-threading feature enabled. The vulnerability, codenamed PortSmash (CVE-2018-5407), has joined the list of other dangerous side-channel vulnerabilities discovered in the past year, including Meltdown and Spectre , TLBleed , and Foreshadow . Discovered by a team of security researchers from the Tampere University of Technology in Finland and Technical University of Havana, Cuba, the new side-channel vulnerability resides in Intel's Hyper-Threading technology, the company's implementation of Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT). Simultaneous MultiThreading is a performance feature that works by splitting up each physical core of a processor into virtual cores, known as threads, allowing each core to...

2018 has been quite a tough year for Intel. While the chip-maker giant is still dealing with Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities, yet another major speculative execution flaw has been revealed in Intel's Core and Xeon lines of processors that may leave users vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Dubbed Foreshadow , alternatively called L1 Terminal Fault or L1TF, the new attacks include three new speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities affecting Intel processors. The Foreshadow attacks could allow a hacker or malicious application to gain access to the sensitive data stored in a computer's memory or third-party clouds, including files, encryption keys, pictures, or passwords. The three Foreshadow vulnerabilities have been categorized into two variants: 1.) Foreshadow Foreshadow ( PDF ) targets a new technology originally been designed to protect select code and users' data from disclosure or modification, even if the entire system falls under a...

Google has by default enabled a security feature called "Site Isolation" in its web browser with the release of Chrome 67 for all desktop users to help them protect against many online threats, including Spectre and Meltdown attack . Site Isolation is a feature of the Google Chrome web browser that adds an additional security boundary between websites by ensuring that different sites are always put into separate processes, isolated from each other. Since each site in the browser gets its own sandboxed process, the feature makes it harder for untrusted websites to access or steal information of your accounts on other websites. In January this year when Google Project Zero researchers disclosed details of Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities, the tech giant recommended Chrome desktop users to manually turn on Site Isolation feature on their devices to mitigate speculative side-channel attacks. "Even if a Spectre attack were to occur in a malicious web page, ...

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