New Variants Of ‘Spectre’ Processor Flaws Have Been Discovered

Several years ago, vulnerabilities were discovered with Intel and AMD’s processors known as Spectre. The companies worked quickly to try and fix and mitigate the issues, where they started shipping new models that supposedly addressed the problems, but it looks like Spectre isn’t going away anytime soon.

According to researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of California San Diego, they have recently published a paper in which they detail at least three new potential Spectre attacks that can affect modern day Intel and AMD processors that use micro-op caches. The report goes on to claim that the current mitigations that were put into place will not be able to protect against these new variants.

The researchers say that prior to publication, they notified both Intel and AMD, and according to Intel, the issues highlighted have already been mitigated. “Intel reviewed the report and informed researchers that existing mitigations were not being bypassed and that this scenario is addressed in our secure coding guidance. Software following our guidance already have protections against incidental channels including the uop cache incidental channel. No new mitigations or guidance are needed.”

That being said, while these vulnerabilities are concerning, it should be noted that due to the complexity and difficulty of pulling off these attacks, there is a slim chance it will affect many people at all, but it’s something worth taking note of anyway.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers
Tags: AMD, Hack, Intel, Security