Computer scientists unveil novel attacks on cybersecurity

Researchers have found two novel types of attacks that target the conditional branch predictor found in high-end Intel processors, which could be exploited to compromise billions of processors currently in use.

The multi-university and industry research team led by computer scientists at University of California San Diego will present their work at the 2024 ACM ASPLOS Conference that begins tomorrow. The paper, "Pathfinder: High-Resolution Control-Flow Attacks Exploiting the Conditional Branch Predictor," is based on findings from scientists from UC San Diego, Purdue University, Georgia Tech, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Google.

They discover a unique attack that is the first to target a feature in the branch predictor called the Path History Register, which tracks both branch order ...