New Spectre-like CPU vulnerability bypasses existing defenses

New Spectre-like CPU vulnerability bypasses existing defenses

Security researchers have found a new way to abuse the speculative execution mechanism of modern CPUs to break security boundaries and leak the contents of kernel memory. The new technique abuses a system instruction called SWAPGS and can bypass mitigations put in place for previous speculative execution vulnerabilities like Spectre.

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The vulnerability was discovered by researchers from security firm Bitdefender and was reported to Intel almost a year ago. Since then, it has followed a lengthy coordination process that also involved Microsoft, which released mitigations during last month’s Patch Tuesday.

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