Google on Friday released proof-of-concept code for conducting a Spectre-based attack against its Chrome browser to show how web developers can take steps to mitigate browser-based side-channel attacks.
The code, posted to GitHub, demonstrates how an attacker can pull data from device memory at speed of 1kB/s when running on Chrome 88 on an Intel Skylake CPU. According to Google, the attack should work on other browsers, even those running on Arm-based Apple M1 chips.
The code executes a timing attack, by which the attacker observes the time required to access memory and infers whether the selected address is in the cache or needs to be loaded, based on whether the operation was fast or slow.
