Notorious Spectre CPU vulnerability returns hitting JIT engines via side channel attacks
- New Spectre variant exploits processor prediction behavior in just-in-time compilers
- Researchers demonstrated practical attacks against Intel-based Linux systems
- Vendors released mitigations as security teams assess performance tradeoffs
The dreaded Spectre vulnerability which had chip manufacturers scrambling for a fix a few years ago, has returned, experts have claimed.
Security researchers from the Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy published a new report, detailing a type of attack they call Branch Target Reuse (BTR).
They labeled it the first practical in-place Spectre v2 attack that targets just-in-time (JIT) compilers - and it's a lot to decompile (pun intended), so let’s break it all down.
Spectre and Meltdown
Modern microprocessors come with a feature called “speculative execution” - they speculate what a program’s next moves might be, and load them in advance, so that when one scenario actually happens, it can be executed rather quickly.
They also...
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