Specter meltdown code#

But Bosman confirms theories that the bug is more serious: It allows malicious code to not only locate the kernel in memory, but steal that memory's contents, too. Many security researchers who spotted signs of developers working to fix that bug had speculated that the Intel flaw merely allowed hackers to defeat a security protection known as Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization, which makes it far more difficult for hackers to find the location of the kernel in memory before they use other tricks to attack it.

And with a series of speculative execution and cache probes, he or she can start to assemble parts of the computer's high privilege memory, including even sensitive personal information or passwords.

By carefully crafting requests to the processor and seeing how fast it responds, a hacker's code could figure out whether the requested data is in the cache or not. But before it does, it stores them in its cache, a collection of temporary memory allotted to the processor to give it quick access to recent data. Retrieving any data from that privileged peeking isn't simple, since once the processor stops its speculative execution and jumps back to the fork in its instructions, it throws out the results.

Specter meltdown full#

On Wednesday evening, a large team of researchers at Google's Project Zero, universities including the Graz University of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Adelaide in Australia, and security companies including Cyberus and Rambus together released the full details of two attacks based on that flaw, which they call Meltdown and Spectre.

And on multi-user machines, like the servers run by Google Cloud Services or Amazon Web Services, they could even allow hackers to break out of one user's process, and instead snoop on other processes running on the same shared server.

Specter meltdown software#

Theoretical attacks that exploit that bug, based on quirks in features Intel has implemented for faster processing, could allow malicious software to spy deeply into other processes and data on the target computer or smartphone. So when a security flaw in computers' most deep-seated hardware puts a crack in those walls, as one newly discovered vulnerability in millions of processors has done, it breaks some of the most fundamental protections computers promise-and sends practically the entire industry scrambling.Įarlier this week, security researchers took note of a series of changes Linux and Windows developers began rolling out in beta updates to address a critical security flaw: A bug in Intel chips allows low-privilege processes to access memory in the computer's kernel, the machine's most privileged inner sanctum. Otherwise, it might peer into other processes, or snoop around the computer as a whole. One of the most basic premises of computer security is isolation: If you run somebody else's sketchy code as an untrusted process on your machine, you should restrict it to its own tightly sealed playpen.