Some of the protections against the Spectre CPU vulnerability introduced in modern browsers can be defeated, security researchers revealed this week.
According to research published by Aleph Security on Tuesday, the company's researchers were able to put together proof-of-concept code that retrieves sensitive data from a browser's protected memory.
The browsers were running a version that received mitigations against such attacks, researchers said.
The Aleph team says their PoC bypassed Spectre mitigations and retrieved data from browsers such as Edge, Chrome, and Safari. They were not able to retrieve browser memory data from Firefox, mainly because of a different type of mitigation Mozilla had used for its browser.
Researchers bypass Spectre v1 in-browser protections
More precisely, researchers bypassed the in-browser mitigations introduced to fend off the Spectre v1 CPU vulnerability, the only one of the Meltdown and Spectre bugs that
could be exploited via a web browser.
... ...