Intel soothes Hyperthreading hack fear
Intel allayed concerns over the possibility of hackers using a vulnerability in its Hyperthreading technology to steal cryptographic keys from compromised servers.
According to Colin Percival, a computer security researcher at Oxford University, processes that share the processor's cache memory could allow an attacker to discover keys by running a malicious thread running with limited privileges that monitors the execution of another thread running on the same processor.
This spy process measures the time taken for cache operations and from that can work out what the other process is doing. As Percival observed, this is a "footprint in the cache".
"Caches have already been demonstrated to be cryptographically dangerous," said Percival. "Having caches shared between threads provides a vastly more dangerous avenue of attack."
