Chip-busting boffins in America have devised yet another way to filch sensitive data by exploiting Intel's processor design choices.
Doctoral students Riccardo Paccagnella and Licheng Luo, and assistant professor Christopher Fletcher, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, delved into the way CPU ring interconnects work, and found they can be abused for side-channel attacks. The upshot is that one application can read another application's private memory and snoop on the user's key presses.
"It is the first attack to exploit contention on the cross-core interconnect of Intel CPUs," explained Paccagnella told The Register. "The attack does not rely on sharing memory, cache sets, core-private resources or any specific uncore structures. As a consequence, it is hard to mitigate with existing side channel defenses."
Side-channel attacks, like the 2018 Spectre ..
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