Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

A team of researchers from six universities, along with antivirus software provider BitDefender Holding BV, today detailed a flaw in Intel CPUs that could theoretically be exploited by hackers to steal data.

Intel released a bug patch and disclosure.

The researchers named the defect load injection LVI. This is the same as the infamous crashes and ghosts found in Intel processors a few years ago. Several team members who discovered this latest flaw also played a role in exposing crashes and ghosts.

Like its predecessor, LVI exploits a weakness in CPU functionality called speculative execution to facilitate attacks. Speculative execution is a method of increasing processing speed, in which the CPU guesses which calculations a program will make in the near future and executes those calculations ahead of time. If the guess is wrong, the result is simply discarded.

The impact of the crash is to allow hackers to read the results of speculative calculations while the CPU waits to see if they are correct. Therefore, you can view data processed by vulnerable computers. LVI, on the other hand, relies on a related but different strategy that allows an attacker to get the CPU to run malicious code as if it were a legitimate speculative computation.

The researchers explained in the network set up for LVI: "We smuggle attacker data into victim programs through hidden processor buffers and hijack brief executions to obtain sensitive information such as victim fingerprints or passwords.

The vulnerability makes it possible to steal data from SGX enclaves, which are separate parts of Intel processor memory used to store particularly important records such as encryption keys. More recently, LVI has also allowed hackers to infect vulnerable machines via malicious websites.

The good news for businesses is that the severity of the threat posed by the vulnerability is limited by the complexity of the actual exploit. In an advisory today, Intel said,"Because of the many complex requirements that must be met to successfully implement LVI, Intel believes that LVI has no practical use in operating systems and VMM trusted real-world environments.

However, in some cases, some hackers may still try to exploit these flaws. This is because LVI's software patches reduce CPU speeds by 2 to 17 times, depending on its mode of application, and it is expected that this slowdown will cause many administrators to avoid installing and fixing. Intel plans to add hardware-level mitigations for LVI to future products to eliminate the risk of attacks.

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