A recent cybersecurity revelation by academic researchers has shed light on a new Spectre-like vulnerability affecting modern Intel processors. The discovery unveils a potential encryption-cracking campaign that could compromise sensitive data. The group of researchers from the University of California San Diego, Purdue University, UNC Chapel Hill, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Google identified a flaw in the branch predictor known as the Path History Register (PHR) that could be exploited to extract confidential information.
The vulnerability, named “Pathfinder” by the researchers, leverages the PHR feature to manipulate the branch predictor and launch sophisticated attacks aimed at reconstructing program control flow history and executing high-resolution Spectre attacks. Hosein Yavarzadeh, the lead author of the paper, highlighted that Pathfinder enables attackers to access critical components of the branch predictor, potentially compromising encryption keys and secret images from libraries like libjpeg.
Spectre, a notorious side-channel attack, manipulated branch prediction and speculative execution in processors to retrieve sensitive data stored in memory. In the context of Pathfinder, the PHR is tricked into inducing branch mispredictions, leading to the inadvertent execution of unintended code paths within victim programs, thereby exposing confidential data.
The researchers demonstrated the attack’s efficacy by successfully extracting an AES encryption key and leaking secret images during libjpeg image processing. Intel was alerted to the vulnerability in November last year and promptly addressed the issue by releasing a security advisory in April this year. The advisory confirmed that the existing Spectre mitigations also cover the Pathfinder vulnerability.
Interestingly, the researchers noted that AMD’s processors appear to be unaffected by the Pathfinder attack, underscoring potential variations in vulnerability across different CPU architectures. For further details and in-depth insights, interested readers can access the full research paper here.
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