Ready for another fright? Spectre flaws in today's computer chips can be exploited to hide, run stealthy malware
Spectre – the security vulnerabilities in modern CPUs' speculative execution engines that can be exploited to steal sensitive data – just won't quietly die in the IT world.
Its unwelcome persistence isn't merely a consequence of the long lead time required to implement mitigations in chip architecture; it's also sustained by its ability to inspire novel attack techniques.
The latest of these appeared in a paper presented at the Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium 2019 in San Diego, California, on Monday.
Co-authored by three computer science boffins from the University of Colorado, Boulder in the US – Jack Wampler, Ian Martiny, and Eric Wustrow – the paper, "ExSpectre: Hiding Malware in Speculative Execution," describes a way to compile malicious code into a seemingly innocuous payload binary, so it can be executed through speculative execution without detection.
