Researchers find fresh bugs in some Intel, AMD processors

Thursday, 10 August 2023 08:06

Researchers find fresh bugs in some Intel, AMD processors Featured

By Sam Varghese

Image by Michael Schwarzenberger from Pixabay

Two more vulnerabilities in CPUs have surfaced this week, one in Intel hardware and the other in AMD's offerings.

The Intel bug, given the name Downfall, allows a user to gain access to, and steal, data from another user on the same machine. It was reported to Intel on 24 August 2022.

The flaw is due to memory optimisation features in Intel processors that allow internal hardware registers to be viewed by software.

Google senior research scientist Daniel Moghimi, who discovered the bug, wrote: "I discovered that the Gather instruction, meant to speed up accessing scattered data in memory, leaks the content of the internal vector register file during speculative execution."

Speculative execution is the process whereby a CPU tries to guess the next instruction in a process in order to speed up things.

Said Moghimi: "For instance, a malicious app obtained from an app store could use the Downfall attack to steal sensitive information like passwords, encryption keys, and private data such as banking details, personal emails, and messages.

"Similarly, in cloud computing environments, a malicious customer could exploit the Downfall vulnerability to steal data and credentials from other customers who share the same cloud computer."

He said it was likely that most users were affected even if they did not use Intel processors, because, "Intel’s server market share is more than 70%, so most likely, everyone on the Internet is affected".

Intel has released updated microcode for the affected processors and advised users to update to the latest version of firmware provided by the system manufacturer that addressed these issues.

The other vulnerability, affecting AMD processors, has been given the moniker Inception and is a new speculative side channel attack.

Daniël Trujillo, Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi of ETH Zurich were acknowledged as having discovered the vulnerability.

They wrote: "Over the past 11⁄2 years, we have studied two phenomena that enable an unprivileged attacker to leak arbitrary information on all modern AMD CPUs:

"Phantom speculation: We can trigger misprediction without any branch at the source of the misprediction.
"Training in Transient Execution: We can manipulate future mispredictions through a previous misprediction that we trigger."

AMD's advisory said: "The attack can result in speculative execution at an attacker-controlled address, potentially leading to information disclosure."

It said customers should apply either the standalone µcode patch or a BIOS update that incorporated the µcode patch for products based on Zen 3 and Zen 4 CPU architectures.

"No µcode patch or BIOS update, which includes the µcode patch, is necessary for products based on Zen or Zen 2 CPU architectures because these architectures are already designed to flush branch type predictions from the branch predictor," AMD added.

Last month, AMD acknowledged a flaw in its processors based on the Zen 2 architecture and issued fixes for the same.

Back in 2018, two flaws, due to errors in speculative execution, named Spectre and Meltdown, surfaced, but neither affected AMD hardware. Only Intel processors were affected.

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