Eurekalert April 26, 2024
A team of researchers in the US (UC San Diego, University of North Carolina, Purdue University, Georgia Tech, industry) introduced novel attack primitives that enable adversaries to leak (read) and manipulate (write) the path history register (PHR) and the prediction history tables (PHTs) of the conditional branch predictor in high-performance CPUs. These primitives enable two new classes of attacks: first, it can recover the entire control flow history of a victim program by exploiting read primitives as demonstrated by a practical secret-image recovery based on capturing the entire control flow of libjpeg routines. It can also launch extremely high-resolution transient attacks by exploiting write primitives. They demonstrated this with a key recovery attack against Advanced Encryption Standard based on extracting intermediate values… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE (Conf. Paper)
Paper details two novel attacks that could compromise billions of intel processors in use. Credit: CREDIT: Hosein Yavarzadeh