Speculative Execution
New VMScape attack breaks guest-host isolation on AMD, Intel CPUs
A new Spectre-like attack dubbed VMScape allows a malicious virtual machine (VM) to leak cryptographic keys from an unmodified QEMU hypervisor process running on modern AMD or Intel CPUs. The attack breaks the isolation between VMs and the cloud hypervisor, bypassing existing Spectre mitigations and threatening to leak sensitive data by leveraging speculative execution. The […]
New Intel CPU flaws leak sensitive data from privileged memory
A new “Branch Privilege Injection” flaw in all modern Intel CPUs allows attackers to leak sensitive data from memory regions allocated to privileged software like the operating system kernel. Typically, these regions are populated with information like passwords, cryptographic keys, memory of other processes, and kernel data structures, so protecting them from leakage is crucial. According to ETH […]
New Apple CPU side-channel attacks steal data from browsers
A team of security researchers has disclosed new side-channel vulnerabilities in modern Apple processors that could steal sensitive information from web browsers. The Georgia Institute of Technology and Ruhr University Bochum researchers, who presented another attack dubbed ‘iLeakage’ in October 2023, presented their new findings in two separate papers, namely FLOP and SLAP, which show distinct flaws […]