Hyperthreading could allow hackers to compromise servers
Intel's hyperthreading technology could allow a hacker to steal security keys from a compromised server using a sophisticated timing attack, a researcher said Friday in a paper presented at the BSDCan 2005 conference.
Hyperthreading allows software to take advantage of unused execution units in a processor. It essentially allows two separate processes, or software threads, to execute on a single processor at the same time, improving performance on software written to take advantage of the technology. However, by taking advantage of the fact that the processes share access to a chip's cache memory, a malicious user can determine the security keys to a particular computer by monitoring the cache for those keys, said Colin Percival, an independent researcher, in a paper posted to his Web site.
Intel and several software companies are working on a fix for the problem, but they do not consider it a critical issue, an Intel spokesman said.
Percival presented his paper Friday in Ottawa at BSDCan, a Canadian conference for developers working with the BSD operating system, a version of Unix. While Percival discovered the flaw while running the FreeBSD operating system, the exploit will work on all operating systems that support Intel chips with hyperthreading, he said in his paper. Percival could not be immediately reached for comment following his presentation.
