Last May, we commented on a vulnerability affecting the company's chips. Intel manufactured from 2011, through which attackers could spy on and collect user information, including web browsing history, passwords, messages, etc.
Despite all the efforts on the software side (in the case of Apple with macOS), the problem was not completely resolved ie Intel had to fix it in the manufacture of its chips. However, even with the launch of the manufacturer's 9th generation processors (called “Cascade Lake”), two groups of researchers were able to explore a new version of the same loophole that has struck the company's products for years, as reported by WIRED.
Specifically, the problem involves two Intel hardware failures: the so-called ZombieLoad V2 (CVE-2019-11135) and RIDL (Rogue In-Flight Data Load). The last time chip-related issues emerged, a number of security researchers warned Intel of the risks of such vulnerabilities. At the time, the company said that eighth and ninth generation chips were built to “avoid the threats” but, as it turned out, this was not quite the case.
These problems continue to haunt Intel processors for one simple reason (understandable, but probably not so easy to fix): they have to do with the processor architecture itself.
In this sense, to achieve ever-increasing speeds, Intel chips were designed to predict and anticipate some computational tasks as the system used; This, however, induces you to “remember” certain data to run it faster, but to make it available to potential attackers who need physical access to the computer to collect processor information, it should be noted.
But these are not the only flaws Intel chips are subject to: There are two other issues that help hackers break down the barriers that protect machine data access: Meltdown and Specter.
In response to the failure to address these vulnerabilities, Intel has defended its attempts to address them in the latest chips. Still, the company admitted that repairing its chips was 100% effective (as you can see) and that some data was “still leaking”; The manufacturer also stated that with each new generation the level of difficulty to access this information gets higher.
Despite all of this, alleviate it: According to Intel, there are no reports of actual computer hacking from these flaws. So keep on keeping your computer safe that nothing bad will happen to anyone so hopefully.
via TechCrunch
