"Downfall Attacks Can Gather Passwords, Encryption Keys From Intel Processors"
Various Intel Core processors and the devices that use them are vulnerable to "Downfall," a new class of attacks stemming from CVE-2022-40982, which enables attackers to access and steal sensitive data such as passwords, encryption keys, and private data from other users on the same personal or cloud computer. CVE-2022-40982 results from memory optimization features in Intel processors that unintentionally reveal internal hardware registers to software. Daniel Moghimi, a research scientist at Google, explained that this allows untrusted software to access data stored by other programs that typically would not be accessible. During speculative execution, he discovered that the Gather instruction, which is meant to speed up access to scattered data in memory, exposes the contents of the internal vector register file. He devised two exploitation techniques, Gather Data Sampling (GDS) and Gather Value Injection (GVI). He demonstrated how they can be used to steal AES keys, data from the Linux kernel, and other sensitive information. This article continues to discuss CVE-2022-40982 and the Downfall attacks.