Intel processors are vulnerable to a new side-channel attack, which researchers said can allow attackers to steal sensitive information such as encryption keys or passwords.
Unlike previous side-channel attacks, this attack does not rely on sharing memory, cache sets and other former tactics. Instead it leverages a component called CPU ring interconnect contention. This component facilitates communication across various CPU units – including cores, the last-level cache, system agent, and graphics unit – on modern Intel processors, such as the Skylake and Coffee Lake CPUs.
Riccardo Paccagnella, one of the researchers with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who discovered the attack, told Threatpost that the side-channel attack could give attackers the means to infer “key bits” from both vulnerable cryptographic implementations and from the precise timing of keystrokes typed by a victim user.
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Source: ThreatPost