Researchers from the College of William and Mary, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California Riverside, and Binghamton University have described a security attack that uses the speculative execution features of modern processors to leak sensitive information and undermine the security boundaries that operating systems and software erect to protect important data. That probably sounds familiar. The Spectre attacks, published earlier this year, take advantage of the speculative execution features of modern processors to leak sensitive information. The new attack, named BranchScope by the researchers, shares some similarity with variant 2 of the Spectre attack, as both BranchScope and Spectre 2 take advantage of the behavior of the processor’s branch predictor. With speculative execution, the processor runs ahead of where the program actually is, and it tries to execute instructions before it can be certain if those instructions will actually be run. For example, if a program tests whether two numbers are equal and does one thing if they are and another, different thing if they aren’t, the processor will guess the outcome, and speculatively executes the resulting action. If it later turns out that the processor guessed wrong, the speculative results are thrown away and, at least in an abstract… Read full this story
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It’s not just Spectre: Researchers reveal more branch prediction attacks have 379 words, post on arstechnica.com at March 26, 2018. This is cached page on Vietnam Colors. If you want remove this page, please contact us.