Security News New Spectre-Style 'Pathfinder' Attack Targets Intel CPU, Leak Encryption Keys and Data

[silversurfer]

Content source

https://thehackernews.com/2024/05/new-spectre-style-pathfinder-attack.html

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.

 

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

From that article:

Following responsible disclosure in November 2023, Intel, in an advisory released last month, said Pathfinder builds on Spectre v1 attacks and that previously deployed mitigations for Spectre v1 and traditional side-channels mitigate the reported exploits. There is no evidence that it impacts AMD CPUs.

So, nothing to worry about?

 

[nicolaasjan]

...targeting high-performance Intel CPUs...

Nothing to worry about for me at least.
Intel Core i5-4570T bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Haswell rev: 3 L2

 

[DDE_Server]

Nothing to worry about for me at least.
Intel Core i5-4570T bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Haswell rev: 3 L2

i think fourth generation not worth the effort of the attack lol your bro here is Core i5-3230M hahahahah

 

[nicolaasjan]

I asked Copilot:
Do you know of any Spectre attacks that happened in the wild?

Reply:

Spectre attacks, which exploit speculative execution features in CPUs to leak sensitive data, have been a significant concern since their discovery. However, actual attacks "in the wild" are not commonly reported, possibly due to the complexity of executing such attacks and the availability of easier attack vectors for malicious actors.

The research on Spectre attacks, such as the analysis of speculative type confusion vulnerabilities, indicates that while there are exploitable and potentially exploitable vulnerabilities, especially in systems like the Linux kernel, these are often hard to execute and require a high level of expertise¹². Moreover, many of the examples of Spectre attacks provided by researchers are proof-of-concept rather than being used in real-world scenarios³.

It's important to note that while Spectre attacks are a serious theoretical threat, the actual occurrence of such attacks in the wild is not well-documented, and they are considered unlikely to be used compared to other more straightforward vulnerabilities³. Nonetheless, the potential risk has led to the development of various mitigations at both the software and hardware levels to protect against speculative execution vulnerabilities.

Source: Conversation with Bing, 13-5-2024
(1) An Analysis of Speculative Type Confusion Vulnerabilities in the Wild .... An Analysis of Speculative Type Confusion Vulnerabilities in the Wild | USENIX.
(2) An Analysis of Speculative Type Confusion Vulnerabilities in the Wild. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec21-kirzner.pdf.
(3) Spectre vulnerability: 4 years after discovery - Kaspersky. 4 years since Sperctre vulnerability discovery.
(4) en.wikipedia.org. Spectre (security vulnerability) - Wikipedia.

That's why I turned off the OS (Linux) mitigations at the Kernel level.
I don't want my system to be any slower than it already is.