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Researchers Disclose New 'Inverse Spectre Attack' (digitaljournal.com)
A new Intel security flaw has been discovered that potentially allows passwords to be stolen. An anonymous reader quotes Digital Journal:
As EE News reports, researchers said the new flaw enables an "inverse spectre attack". According to Giorgi Maisuradze and Professor Dr. Christian Rossow a ret2spec (return-to-speculation) vulnerability with the chips allows for would-be attackers to read data without authorization. According to Professor Rossow: "The security gap is caused by CPUs predicting a so-called return address for runtime optimization."
The implications of this are: "If an attacker can manipulate this prediction, he gains control over speculatively executed program code. It can read out data via side channels that should actually be protected from access." This means, in essence, that malicious web pages could interpret the memory of the web browser in order to access and copy critical data. Such data would include stored passwords.
"At least all Intel processors of the past ten years are affected by the vulnerabilities," reports EE News, adding "Similar attack mechanisms could probably also be derived for ARM and AMD processors...."
"Manufacturers were notified of the weaknesses in May 2018 and were granted 90 days to remedy them before the results were published. That deadline has now expired."
The implications of this are: "If an attacker can manipulate this prediction, he gains control over speculatively executed program code. It can read out data via side channels that should actually be protected from access." This means, in essence, that malicious web pages could interpret the memory of the web browser in order to access and copy critical data. Such data would include stored passwords.
"At least all Intel processors of the past ten years are affected by the vulnerabilities," reports EE News, adding "Similar attack mechanisms could probably also be derived for ARM and AMD processors...."
"Manufacturers were notified of the weaknesses in May 2018 and were granted 90 days to remedy them before the results were published. That deadline has now expired."
It sounds like you haven't read the details of these attack vectors.
1. The family of Spectre vulnerabilities are exploitable from javascript.
2. Yes, there is much malware, that doesn't make Spectre and meltdown attacks any less viable/devastating.
3. Statistical attacks have been used for a long time. Computers are great at performing them, because, yes, they are computers. Side channels don't need much bandwidth to steal critical information, like say, a users password or bank account details.
These attack vectors are serious. I'd encourage you to read the papers, and read up on side-channel attacks.
Considering that these vulnerabilities also (largely) apply to AMD and ARM, your cheap-shot snark is duly noted and ignored for the shit it is.
Mitigation is cheaper on AMD, because they at least tried to do the right thing. And they only tend to be a problem for 64-bit ARM. The biggest failures here are Intel and IBM.
Lots of word salad with no proof. Yawn...
There's no proof that those are real-world scenarios?
I can much more easily defend against a stabbing, because they need to be at very close range. (i.e. On your fucking system) whereas a bullet can travel over a mile and kill you.
Javascript is on your system. Malware hidden in applications is real, and on people's systems.
The rest of your statements are equally delusional and devoid of rationality, so...
...they're totally rational and you couldn't find any good arguments against them, either, so you just gave up. Noted.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"