New type of attack can slip past the defenses in your computer’s processor

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have discovered a new class of processor attacks called TONTOU. As MIT News reports, the attack exploits a tiny timing gap in the defenses used to prevent chips from leaking secrets through predictive processing. By using a technique called interrupt injection, the team successfully bypassed protections on several generations of Intel and AMD processors, even extracting root password hashes from a Linux system. AMD has since released a patch to mitigate the vulnerability, which users can obtain by updating their operating systems.

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