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New 'CacheOut' attack targets Intel processors, with a fix arriving soon
Researchers have discovered and published information on what they're calling CacheOut, a vulnerability in most Intel CPUs that allows an attacker to target more specific data, even stored within Intel's secured SGX enclave.
Intel assigned what's known as the CVE-2020-0549 vulnerability a threat level of "medium," acknowledging the danger of a targeted attack. The company noted that CacheOut has never been used outside of a laboratory environment.
Among the threats CacheOut poses is to cloud providers, and leaking data from hypervisors (virtual machine monitors) and the virtual machines running on them. Because the researchers disclosed the CacheOut vulnerability privately to Intel some time before making it public, those cloud providers have already deployed countermeasures against CacheOut.
Intel said that it plans to release mitigations to address the issue in the near future. These normally are sent to users in the form of BIOS or driver updates.
Virtually all Intel processors are potentially affected by CacheOut, save for processors released after the fourth quarter of 2019. AMD processors are not affected, according to details released on a dedicated CacheOut site. Processors made by IBM and ARM may be affected, but have not been confirmed. The paper, by lead author researcher Stephan van Schaik of the University of Michigan and colleagues, has also been made public.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @10:02AM
You can search Soylent. A couple of us specifically mentioned this domain (cache flushing bugs relying on sequencing or timing) when the earlier speculation bugs came out. It's been a known fertile area the whole time, just nobody had monetized it in the wild.
If Soylentils knew you can be sure others have also stumbled upon, fuzzed, or analyzed for similar.