Researchers discover new ways to abuse Meltdown and Spectre flaws
Intel has already started looking for other Spectre-like flaws, but it won't be able to move on from the Spectre/Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities anytime soon. A team of security researchers from NVIDIA and Princeton University have discovered new ways to exploit Meltdown and Spectre outside of those idenfitied in the past. The researchers developed a tool to explore how else cyber criminals could take advantage of the CPU flaws and found new techniques that could be used to extract sensitive info like passwords from devices. These techniques, which they've dubbed MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime, pit two CPU cores against each other to dupe multi-core systems and get access to their cached data. The team wrote in their report (PDF): "In the context of Spectre and Meltdown, leveraging coherence invalidations enables a Prime+Probe attack to achieve the same level of precision as a Flush+Reload attack and leak the same type of information. By exploiting cache invalidation...