Eight new vulnerabilities discovered in intel processors

Several researchers have found eight new vulnerabilities in Intel's processors, four of which are high-risk, further compounding the situation after the Meltdown and Specter issues came to light.

Intel has four very serious new vulnerabilities

Specter and Meltdown are just the tip of the iceberg, as Intel's processors contain eight other previously unknown vulnerabilities, some of which are even more serious than Meltdown and Specter. These newly discovered vulnerabilities have already been assigned numbers in the Vulnerability Enumerator (CVE) directory and probably have their own names as well.

We recommend reading our post on Cannonlake processors will not be immune to Meltdown and Specter

Four of these eight new vulnerabilities are especially severe, while the other four have been classified as medium risk. Some of these more serious four can be exploited to attack across virtual machine boundaries, attackers could run their malicious code on a virtual machine and attack the host system from there, making them more serious even than Specter.

These new vulnerabilities pose a huge security risk to cloud service providers, for example, passwords and secret keys for data transmission are in serious danger. Also, Intel Software Protection Extensions to protect sensitive data are not effective in this case.

Hopefully Intel will release new patches to mitigate these new vulnerabilities, the company needs to rethink its overall CPU design, something that will surely happen in the face of the new Ocean Cove architecture.

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