CVE-2020-8694

In January 2018, the entire computer industry was put on alert by two new processor vulnerabilities dubbed Meltdown and Spectre that defeated the fundamental OS security boundaries separating kernel and user space memory. The flaws stemmed from a performance feature of modern CPUs known as speculative execution and mitigating them required one of the biggest patch coordination […]

Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news and articles: Every employee has a cybersecurity blind spot 80% of companies say that an increased cybersecurity risk caused by human factors has posed a challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in times of heightened stress. Microsoft advises users to stop using SMS- and voice-based MFA Multi-factor authentication (MFA) that depends on one of the authentication factors being delivered via SMS and voice calls … More →

Researchers have devised a new method that allows potential attackers to leak sensitive information such as encryption keys from the Linux kernel’s memory and Intel SGX enclaves. The attack, dubbed PLATYPUS, abuses a legitimate CPU interface for monitoring and controlling the power consumption. “Using PLATYPUS, we demonstrate that we can observe variations in the power […]

Researchers have disclosed the details of a new side-channel attack method that can be used to obtain sensitive information from a system by observing variations in the processor’s power consumption.

An international team of security researchers is presenting new side-channel attacks (CVE-2020-8694 and CVE-2020-8695), which use fluctuations in software power consumption to access sensitive data on Intel CPUs. Intel and power side-channel attacks Power side-channel attacks are attacks that exploit fluctuations in power consumption to extract sensitive data such as cryptographic keys. Because power measurements by malware were previously very inaccurate, such attacks required physical access to the target device and special measurement tools such … More →