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Mon, May 03, 2021 | Updated 05.54PM IST
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New Spectre vulnerability found in Intel, AMD processors
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New Spectre vulnerability found in Intel, AMD processors

Gadgets Now / Updated: May 3, 2021, 05:43PM IST
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New Spectre vulnerability found in Intel AMD processors
The 2018 Spectre vulnerability in Intel and AMD processors is far from being over. Researchers have now found new variants of the Spectre flaw that affects almost all new processors from Intel and AMD with “micro-op caches”.

“Modern Intel, AMD, and ARM processors translate complex instructions into simpler internal micro-ops that are then cached in a dedicated on-chip structure called the microop cache,” explained researchers from University of Virginia and University of California San Diego.

The researchers claimed that the flaws are crucial because the current patches are not enough to protect users. Having said that the newly found vulnerabilities are hard to crack.

The researchers said that there could be three types of attacks. “(1) a same thread cross-domain attack that leaks secrets across the userkernel boundary, (2) a cross-SMT thread attack that transmits secrets across two SMT threads via the micro-op cache, and (3) transient execution attacks that have the ability to leak an unauthorized secret accessed along a misspeculated path, even before the transient instruction is dispatched to execution, breaking several existing invisible speculation and fencing-based solutions that mitigate Spectre,” as per the report that they have published.

Both Intel and AMD have been warned about the vulnerabilities which would allow hackers to steal data from systems. While there is no information as to when we can expect both the companies to fix the issues the thing is that using micro-ops cache vulnerabilities to steal data is a tough job that requires a particular malware to breach all levels of hardware and software security restrictions.

Also, another challenge is that the solutions suggested by the researchers to eliminate the risk could be quite difficult for Intel and AMD to administer as there is a "much greater performance penalty" involved.

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