SPOILER: Intel CPUs afflicted with simple data-spewing spec-exec vulnerability

The researchers – Saad Islam, Ahmad Moghimi, Ida Bruhns, Moritz Krebbel, Berk Gulmezoglu, Thomas Eisenbarth and Berk Sunar – have found that “a weakness in the address speculation of Intel’s proprietary implementation of the memory subsystem” reveals memory layout data, making other attacks like Rowhammer much easier to carry out. “The root cause of the issue is that the memory operations execute speculatively and the processor resolves the dependency when the full physical address bits are available,” said Moghimi. “The root cause for SPOILER is a weakness in the address speculation of Intel’s proprietary implementation of the memory subsystem which directly leaks timing behavior due to physical address conflicts,” the paper explains.

Source: www.theregister.co.uk