"Think about a hypothetical airport security scenario where TSA lets you in without checking your boarding pass because (1) it is fast and efficient, and (2) you will be checked for your boarding pass at the gate anyway," Venkat said.A computer processor does something similar. It predicts that the check will pass and could let instructions into the pipeline. "But it turns out the walls of this waiting area have ears, which our attack exploits. We show how an attacker can smuggle secrets through the micro-op cache by using it as a covert channel. "This newly discovered vulnerability will be much harder to fix.In the case of the previous 'Spectre' attacks, developers have come up with a relatively easy way to prevent any sort of attack without a major performance penalty for computing.

Source: Economic Times May 03, 2021 06:31 UTC