Intel CPUs Vulnerable To New 'BranchScope' Attack (securityweek.com)

wiredmikey writes: Researchers have discovered a new side-channel attack method dubbed "BranchScope" that can be launched against devices with Intel processors. The attack has been identified and demonstrated by a team of researchers, and similar to Meltdown and Spectre, can be exploited by an attacker to obtain potentially sensitive information they normally would not be able to access directly. The attacker needs to have access to the targeted system and they must be able to execute arbitrary code.

Researchers believe the requirements for such an attack are realistic, making it a serious threat to modern computers, "on par with other side-channel attacks." The BranchScope attack has been demonstrated on devices with three types of Intel i5 and i7 CPUs based on Skylake, Haswell and Sandy Bridge microarchitectures. Further reading: As predicted, more branch prediction processor attacks are discovered (ArsTechnica).

Comments

Re:Great

[greenwow]

Same here. We had several Dell Precision 5520 laptops bricked after installing:

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=NFKYX

We have several locations, and unfortunately our IT department didn't communicate that the update did that before I think five were bricked. We paid a lot extra for Dell's ProSupport Plus, but they have no solution yet and won't offer replacements.

Re:TL;DR

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea how these attacks work. You can execute arbitrary code on the physical machine. It may be inside a virtual machine but it's still executing on the physical hardware. That's the only requirement, executing arbitrary code on the CPU. You can do exactly that inside a VM and all the VM's are using the same CPU(s) therefore subject to attack.

You seem to mistakenly think that this requires physical access to the hardware or something.