Researchers have found eight new vulnerabilities in Intel’s processors, four of which are high-risk, further aggravating the situation after Meltdown and Spectre’s problems came to light.
Eight new vulnerabilities discovered in Intel processors
Spectre and Meltdown are just the tips of the iceberg, as Intel’s processors contain eight other previously unknown vulnerabilities, some of which are even more serious than Meltdown and Spectre. These newly discovered vulnerabilities have already been assigned numbers in the Vulnerability Enumerator (CVE) directory and probably also have their own names.
Four of these eight new vulnerabilities are particularly severe, while the other four have been classified as medium-risk. Some of these four most serious can be exploited to attack across the boundaries of virtual machines, attackers could run their malicious code on a virtual machine and attack the host system from there, making them even more serious than Spectre.
These new vulnerabilities represent a huge security risk for cloud service providers, as, for example, passwords and secret keys for data transmission are at serious risk. In addition, Intel’s software protection extensions to protect sensitive data are not effective in this case.
Intel is expected to release new patches to mitigate these new vulnerabilities, and the company needs to rethink its overall CPU design, which is likely to happen for the new Ocean Cove architecture.