![]() “Microsoft is aware of a new transient execution attack named gather data sampling (GDS) or “Downfall.” This vulnerability could be used to infer data from affected CPUs across security boundaries such as user-kernel, processes, virtual machines (VMs), and trusted execution environments.” The new GDS flaw, dubbed “Downfall”, is tracked under CVE-2022-40982… Intel and Microsoft have confirmed that almost all of Intel’s desktop processors, prior to 12th Gen CPUs, are vulnerable to a new Transient Execution or Speculative execution side-channel attack called Gather Data Sampling (GDS) vulnerability (codenamed “Downfall”). Microsoft, Intel confirm “Downfall” of 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th Gen CPUs, firmware out Hence, AMD believes this vulnerability is only potentially exploitable locally, such as via downloaded malware, and recommends customers employ security best practices, including running up-to-date software and malware detection tools.ĪMD is not aware of any exploit of ‘Inception’ outside the research environment at this time… ![]() As with similar attacks, speculation is constrained within the current address space and to exploit, an attacker must have knowledge of the address space and control of sufficient registers at the time of RET (return from procedure) speculation. ![]() This attack is similar to previous branch prediction-based attacks like Spectrev2 and Branch Type Confusion (BTC)/RetBleed. The attack can result in speculative execution at an attacker-controlled address, potentially leading to information disclosure. This way third parties have the possibility to inject predictor entries into the global branch prediction history and leak kernel memory data that could contain sensitive information like passwords and hash codes.AMD has received an external report titled ‘INCEPTION’, describing a new speculative side channel attack. What BHI essentially does is to re-enable previously fixed cross-privilege Spectre V2 exploits by allowing kernel-to-kernel attacks. BHI apparently affects all CPUs already vulnerable to Spectre V2 despite implemented fixes like Intel’s eIBRS and ARM’s CSV2. VUSec explains that the exploit is only proof-of-concept and not meant to educate nefarious third parties on the existing vulnerabilities. Both companies will release fixes as soon as possible, but it remains to be seen if these patches come with slight performance downgrades once again. On the other hand, ARM’s list features Cortex A15, A57 and A72 mobile cores as well as Neoverse V1, N1 and N2 server-grade processors. The list of affected Intel processors includes the 2013 Haswell all the way up to Ice Lake-SP and the latest Core gen 12 Alder Lake models. This time around, the security issue only affects Intel and ARM processors. In the meantime, all of the affected CPU makers have released patches that hindered overall performance to a slight extent, and the latest processor models even have these fixes implemented at a hardware level, yet it looks like Spectre is still alive and kicking in some new form called branch history injection (BHI) as recently reported by VUSec security research group. The Spectre vulnerability was discovered almost 4 years ago and it seemed to affect processors from intel, AMD and ARM.
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