Intel Patches Critical Weaknesses in Billions of Processors

AMD isn’t alone with processor security problems. This week Intel patched a flaw known as Downfall. The researcher who found it says it is a critical flaw and affects billions of processor chips.

Downfall, the researcher from the University of California San Diego says, affects all Intel processors released between 2015 and 2019. This translates to 6th generation (Skylake) to 11th generation (Tiger Lake) chips. Intel calls Downfall Gather Data Sampling.

It does require the hacker to share the same CPU core to launch the attack. While this means that cloud computing is an obvious target, it also means that if an attacker can get malware onto your system, it attack any system.

Oh, yeah. The attack targets high value credentials such as passwords and encryption keys.

Next we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that Intel has released a fix.

The bad news is that the overhead of the mitigation could have a 50% reduction in performance in some use cases.

Intel says that the attack would be hard to pull off. Possibly true, but that is a risk management question you have to answer – yes, no, maybe, some, none.

Credit: PC Magazine