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posted by takyon on Monday January 07 2019, @06:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the leak-or-flood? dept.

Some of the computer security boffins who revealed last year's data-leaking speculative-execution holes have identified yet another side-channel attack that can bypass security protections in modern systems.

While side channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown exploited chip design flaws to glean privileged information, this one is hardware agnostic, involves the Windows and Linux operating system page cache, and can be exploited remotely, within limits.

In a paper provided to The Register in advance of distribution early next week through ArXiv, researchers from Graz University of Technology, Boston University, NetApp, CrowdStrike, and Intel – Daniel Gruss, Erik Kraft, Trishita Tiwari, Michael Schwarz, Ari Trachtenberg, Jason Hennessey, Alex Ionescu, and Anders Fogh – describe a way to monitor how certain processes access memory through the operating system page cache.

"We present a set of local attacks that work entirely without any timers, utilizing operating system calls (mincore on Linux and QueryWorkingSetEx on Windows) to elicit page cache information," wrote the researchers. "We also show that page cache metadata can leak to a remote attacker over a network channel, producing a stealthy covert channel between a malicious local sender process and an external attacker."


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by fyngyrz on Monday January 07 2019, @07:12PM (3 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Monday January 07 2019, @07:12PM (#783301) Journal

    ...eventually will fail due to old age

    Oh, come now. That's just so negative. You could also fail by falling severely ill, getting arrested, or suffering a terrible accident while young!

    --
    No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @07:42PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 07 2019, @07:42PM (#783321)

    Thanks for the laugh!

    > You could also fail by falling severely ill, getting arrested, or suffering a terrible accident while young!

    (Un)fortunately, I've got the genes for a long life (both parents) and I'm well past the adventurous years of youth that might result in arrest or youthful accident.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 08 2019, @05:15AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 08 2019, @05:15AM (#783561)

      Meteor strike?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 08 2019, @07:06PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 08 2019, @07:06PM (#783794)

        Would you like to do the math?