Branchscope is a new vulnerability of intel processors

More problems for Intel, the joint work of four universities in the United States, has discovered a new vulnerability that is present in the company's processors, this is BranchScope.

BranchScop, new vulnerability based on speculative execution

BranchScope is a new vulnerability that affects Intel's processors, this has one point in common with Specter 2, and that is that it takes advantage of branch prediction (BPU), a part of the speculative execution of the company's processors. This new vulnerability targets the directional branching predictor, allowing it to retrieve content stored in SGX enclaves and extract information that should be inaccessible.

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Branch prediction is a component of speculative execution that allows you to decide the operation to calculate in advance, this technique is intended to predict the result of a computer process to improve the performance of the processor compared to what would be offered without speculative execution.

When multiple processes are running on the same physical core, they share a single branch prediction unit, which is useful in terms of utilization and complexity, but opens the door for an attacker to manipulate the shared BPU state, create a channel lateral and derive a direction or target from a branch instruction executed by a victim process.

This new vulnerability would be present in the Sandy Bridge, Haswell and Skylake processors , for now it has not been confirmed if it is also present in Kaby lake and Coffee Lake, although it is most likely that they are based on Skylake. Fortunately, work is already underway to offer users a security update to patch this issue, it should reach users via Windows Update in the coming days.

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