12/17/2023 0 Comments Intel tossed to get spectre meltdownIntel disagreed that the new technique breaks defenses already put in place to protect against transient execution. There has been some pushback since the researchers published their paper. Furthermore, due to the relatively small size of the micro-op cache, our attack is significantly faster than existing Spectre variants that rely on priming and probing several cache sets to transmit secret information, and is considerably more stealthy, as it uses the micro-op cache as its sole disclosure primitive, introducing fewer data/instruction cache accesses, let alone misses. This eludes a whole suite of existing defenses. That makes them vulnerable to the attack we describe, which discloses speculatively accessed secrets through a front-end side channel, before a transient instruction has the opportunity to get dispatched for execution. Most existing invisible speculation and fencing-based solutions focus on hiding the unintended vulnerable side-effects of speculative execution that occur at the backend of the processor pipeline, rather than inhibiting the source of speculation at the front-end. Third, because the micro-op cache sits at the front of the pipeline, well before execution, certain defenses that mitigate Spectre and other transient execution attacks by restricting speculative cache updates still remain vulnerable to micro-op cache attacks." Second, these attacks are not detected by any existing attack or malware profile. “First, it bypasses all techniques that mitigate caches as side channels. “The micro-op cache as a side channel has several dangerous implications,” the researchers wrote in an academic paper. By measuring the timing, power consumption, or other physical properties of a targeted system, an attacker can use a side channel to deduce data that otherwise would be off-limits. The researchers are the first to exploit the micro-ops cache as a side channel, or as a medium for making observations about the confidential data stored inside a vulnerable computing system. By allowing the CPU to fetch the commands quickly and early in the speculative execution process, micro-op caches improve processor speed. The new technique works by targeting an on-chip buffer that caches “micro-ops,” which are simplified commands that are derived from complex instructions. Researchers at the University of Virginia said last week that they found a new transient execution variant that breaks virtually all on-chip defenses that Intel and AMD have implemented to date. Other hardware- and software-based solutions broadly known as "fencing" build digital fences around secret data to protect against transient execution attacks that would allow unauthorized access. In many cases, the new variants have required chipmakers to develop new or augmented defenses to mitigate the attacks.Ī key Intel protection known as LFENCE, for instance, stops more recent instructions from being dispatched to execution before earlier ones. Since Spectre was first described in 2018, new variants have surfaced almost every month. These exploits are known as transient executions. By using code that forces a CPU to execute instructions along the wrong path, Spectre can extract confidential data that would have been accessed had the CPU continued down that wrong path. Further Reading “Meltdown” and “Spectre:” Every modern processor has unfixable security flawsSpectre got its name for its abuse of speculative execution, a feature in virtually all modern CPUs that predicts the future instructions the CPUs might receive and then follows a path that the instructions are likely to follow.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |