On a cold Sunday early last month in the small Austrian city of Graz, three young researchers sat down in front of the computers in their homes and tried to break their most fundamental security protections.
Two days earlier, in their lab at Graz’s University of Technology, Moritz Lipp, Daniel Gruss, and Michael Schwarz had determined to tease out an idea that had nagged at them for weeks, a loose thread in the safeguards underpinning how processors defend the most sensitive memory of billions of computers. After a Saturday night drinking with friends, they got to work the next day, each independently writing code to test a theoretical attack on the suspected vulnerability, sharing their progress via instant message.
Read more…
Source: Wired