Intel faces a new vulnerability called BranchScope

New researchers have discovered a new off-the-shelf attack technique called BranchScope that could affect all devices using Intel processors.

A group of researchers from William & Mary University, California Riverside University, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar and Binghamton University discovered the BranchScope vulnerability. Like Meltdown and Specter attacks, BranchScope can be used by bad guys to gather sensitive information from microprocessor-containing processors.

Experts have successfully tested an attack on three Intel chips, Sandy Bridge, Haswell and Skylake. This shows that the BranchScope can still be exploited on machines that have installed recently released patches for both Specter and Meltdown attacks.

Similar to Specter One, BranchScope technology targets branch prediction mechanisms (BPUs) implemented by processors to improve the performance of chips.

In their report, these experts also offer countermeasures for software and hardware. Hopefully this patch will soon be released by Intel.

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