Researchers discover SplitSpectre, a new Spectre-like CPU attack
Spectre-like variations continue to be discovered, just as academics predicted at the start of 2018.
By Catalin Cimpanu | December 4, 2018
Three academics from Northeastern University and three researchers from IBM Research have discovered a new variation of the Spectre CPU vulnerability that can be exploited via browser-based code.
The research team says this new CPU vulnerability is, too, a design flaw in the microarchitecture of modern processors that can be exploited by attacking the process of “speculative execution,” an optimization technique used to improve CPU performance.
The vulnerability, which researchers codenamed SplitSpectre, is a variation of the original Spectre v1 vulnerability discovered last year and which became public in January 2018.
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More on SplitSpectre can be found in an academic paper entitled “Let’s Not Speculate: Discovering and Analyzing Speculative Execution Attacks.”
It’s no surprise that a new Spectre variation has come to light. The research team who found the initial Meltdown and Spectre attacks predicted this was going to happen. Members of that original research team published seven Meltdown and Spectre variations last month.
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