Intel: New security gap affects all its processors.

Researchers have discovered a new weakness, exclusive to Intel processors. Spoiler compromises all systems running processors, including Macs.

Η A study published March 1 by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the University of Lubek in Germany highlights a new problem specific to Intel proprietary technology for speculative execution, a technique that calculates before they become necessary, "predicting" which are needed in order to normalize the memory bottleneck.

The vulnerability, called Spoiler, in the wake of similar vulnerabilities such as Specter and Meltdown, puts a lot of pressure on Intel - which was notified 90 days before the investigation was published - to ensure that the security gap is filled by software updates.

Of course, researchers doubt the effectiveness of a software solution without a huge loss of performance, while predicting that solving the problem can take up to five years.

The researchers said in an interview, "Spoiler is not a Specter attack. The root cause for Spoiler is a weakness in the address speculation of Intel's proprietary implementation of the memory subsystem which directly leaks timing behavior due to physical address conflicts. ”

The weakness in question differs from the previous ones as it is exclusive to Intel products, as ARM and AMD processors do not share the architectural techniques that leak memory timings into some malware.

"Broadly put, the leakage described in this paper will enable attackers to perform existing attacks more efficiently, or to devise new attacks using the novel knowledge."

Revealing this weakness means that the various attack techniques will become more effective while new ones can be created, these work within a Java program and do not require any administration rights.

With a second thought this is bad news for Intel, which is preparing to launch the new 10nm architecture after a storm of problems and delays. The 10nm series will have to meet the tough competition of the Ryzen 3000 which according to sources will come with an even larger number of cores (from 6 to 16 cores). So the potential drop in performance to correct the gap or even worse, the further delay of the new generation of processors puts the company at a disadvantage.

Source