Researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered a new type of exploit attack, called Inception, that shares similarities with the 2018 Spectre attack. Tracked as CVE-2023-20569, the exploit can be used to leak sensitive from any AMD Zen CPU.
The attack came to light a few days after the discovery of Zenbleed, a critical vulnerability affecting AMD Zen 2 processors.
More in details
- Inception is a new class of transient execution attacks that are triggered by combining the older Phantom speculation (CVE-2022-23825) attack with Training in Transient Execution (TTE).
- It can allow attackers to make the CPU believe that an XOR instruction is a recursive instruction, thus, causing a state of stack buffer overflow attack and leaking arbitrary data from unprivileged processes running on any AMD Zen CPU.
- The attack can bypass mitigations for all known speculative execution attacks that have been applied so far.
How significant is the threat?
Any system with an affected CPU can potentially be the target of the attack. Besides, it poses a significant threat in the realm of cloud computing, where multiple organizations share the same hardware infrastructure for data storage. As a result, this attack can put the security of data integrity at risk across virtual environments, cloud providers, and hardware manufacturers.
What’s the latest update?
Upon becoming aware, AMD acknowledged that the attack could be triggered via downloaded malware. While the firm is not aware of the flaw being exploited in the wild, it has recommended customers employ security best practices, including running up-to-date software and malware detection tools.
Recommended actions
AMD has released microcode in “Zen 3” and “Zen 4” CPU architectures to fully mitigate the attack. Products based on “Zen” or “Zen 2” CPU architectures are safe as they are already designed to flush branch-type predictions from the branch predictor. Additionally, AMD plans to release updated AGESA versions to OEMs, and ODMs and motherboard manufacturers listed in its security bulletin.
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