Intel CPUs Impacted by New PortSmash Side-Channel Vulnerability (zdnet.com)

Intel processors are impacted by a new vulnerability that can allow attackers to leak encrypted data from the CPU's internal processes. From a report: The new vulnerability, which has received the codename of PortSmash, has been discovered by a team of five academics from the Tampere University of Technology in Finland and Technical University of Havana, Cuba. Researchers have classified PortSmash as a side-channel attack. In computer security terms, a side-channel attack describes a technique used for leaking encrypted data from a computer's memory or CPU, which works by recording and analyzing discrepancies in operation times, power consumption, electromagnetic leaks, or even sound to gain additional info that may help break encryption algorithms and recovering the CPU's processed data. Researchers say PortSmash impacts all CPUs that use a Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) architecture, a technology that allows multiple computing threads to be executed simultaneously on a CPU core. [...] Researchers say they've already confirmed that PortSmash impacts Intel CPUs which support the company's Hyper-Threading (HT) technology, Intel's proprietary implementation of SMT.

Comments

Re:Still waiting on my remote root SSH exploit

[iggymanz]

Stupid point of view, you're saying we have to wait until some no-goodnick exploits a known and proven weakness before we lift a finger to do anything? No, they need to be fixed before something bad happens. some of us are responsible for machines that handle billions of dollars, we can't take your lazy attitude

Multicore will be next

[xluap]

If a hyperthread can spy on the other hyperthread that runs on the same core, it is possible to disable hyperthreading.

However, the next exploit will be that one core can spy on another core. This is possible because all cores use the memory subsystem including the L3 cache that is shared between all cores.

Re:Still waiting on my remote root SSH exploit

[postbigbang]

It's not really a war, it's more intrigue and economy

The state actors will try to have the exploits first. They'll pay mightily to have them, and let them do work quietly for a long time. I suspect they're already at work. Because of the problem in AMD's PSP chips, some exploits will never be detected, ever, only blindly wiped at some point.

Other exploits will try to be quiet and quietly unobtrusive for as long as possible. Then there'll be a leak or a copycat found, and available on an onion address for a short while at a slowly degrading price, until someone buys and exposes it, and then there will be a fury of patching until variants of that bug come alive, while other bugs are sitll in stage one or two.

Don't believe nothing's going on. We're just in the quiet stage, until someone either screws up and lets their EK become revealed, or a handy packet snifter starts alarming someone to a rogue somewhere. Then something at stage one will go to stage two. That's how this works.