New Micro-Op Cache Vulnerability Evades All Previous Fixes For Spectre-Like Attacks

ffkom writes: Modern x86 and ARM CPUs translate opcodes into ops, which are usually stored in a cache of their own for later re-use. Researchers from the university of Virginia have found a way to exploit this for side-channel attacks, where malicious code exfiltrates information from other processes or virtual machines based on measurable characteristics of the op-cache state, which they describe in their scientific paper.. This side-channel attack evades all previous fixes for SPECTRE-like attacks, and poses yet another difficult-to-address risk to all software that runs on CPUs that are used by possibly malicious code at the same time -- like code running on other people's computers ('the cloud') or code running on CPUs that at the same time run 'sandboxes' with code from some untrusted sources on the Internet.

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