How a 22-Year-Old Discovered the Worst Chip Flaws in History - Bloomberg
...Horn works at Project Zero, an elite unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, made up of cybersleuths who hunt for "zero day" vulnerabilities, unintended design flaws that can be exploited by hackers to break into computer systems.
...he started looking closely at how chips handle speculative execution -- a speed-enhancing technique where the processor tries to guess what part of code it will be required to execute next and starts performing those steps ahead of time -- and fetching the required data. Horn said the manuals stated that if the processor guessed wrong, the data from those misguided forays would still be stored in the chip’s memory. Horn realized that, once there, the information might be exposed by a clever hacker.
...The techniques Wilhelm and others were testing could be "inverted" to force the processor to run new speculative executions that it wouldn’t ordinarily try. This would trick the chip into retrieving specific data that could be accessed by hackers.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment