MIT News August 11, 2022 A team of researchers in the US (MIT, University of Illinois, Texas Advanced Computing Center) found that a component of computer processors that connects different parts of the chip can be exploited by malicious agents who seek to steal secret information from programs running on the computer. They reverse-engineered the on-chip interconnect and developed two non-invasive mitigation mechanisms to interconnect side-channel attacks and offer insights to guide the design of future defenses. By reverse engineering the mesh interconnect revealed, for the first time, the precise conditions under which it is susceptible to contention. They showed […]
Tag Archives: Computer hacking
UVA engineering computer scientists discover new vulnerability affecting computers globally
EurekAlert April 30, 2021 In 2018, industry and academic researchers revealed a potentially devastating hardware flaw, they called Spectre, which was built into modern computer processors that get their speed from a technique called “speculative execution”. A Spectre attack tricks the processor into executing instructions along the wrong path. Even though the processor recovers and correctly completes its task, hackers can access confidential data while the processor is heading the wrong way. Researchers at the University of Virginia has uncovered a line of attack that breaks all Spectre defenses, meaning that billions of computers and other devices across the globe […]