New ”Superspectre” bug can gain access to your computer, expert warns

If you thought the Spectre vulnerability was bad, look out – something even worse could be on the way.   Security researcher Yuriy Bulygin, who was until last year Intel’s chief threat researcher, says hackers can exploit the infamous chip flaw to gain access to ‘all the secrets’ stored on a machine. The new attack is […]

If you thought the Spectre vulnerability was bad, look out – something even worse could be on the way.   Security researcher Yuriy Bulygin, who was until last year Intel’s chief threat researcher, says hackers can exploit the infamous chip flaw to gain access to ‘all the secrets’ stored on a machine.

The new attack is able to use the Spectre flaw to access a computer’s high level firmware, and get access to its most sensitive information.

The exploit allows hackers to read data from a type of firmware called system management mode memory, which is linked to access rights that control key functions of the machine – from letting administrators configure the system to shutting it down if the processor overloads. 

SMM memory is used in all of Intel’s x86 processors. 

‘The firmware has access to basically all the secrets that are on that physical machine,’ he Bloomberg.  Bulygin, who now runs a startup focused on protecting against threats to firmware called Eclypsium, said in a post on the firms site it has been working with Intel on the flaw since early March. ‘We have discovered a new application of speculative execution attacks, bypassing hardware-based memory protections,’ the firm says on its website. Intel has since announced that it’s aware of the bug. 

‘We have reviewed Eclypsium’s research and, as noted in their blog, we believe that the existing guidance for mitigating Variant 1 and Variant 2 will be similarly effective at mitigating these scenarios,’ an Intel spokesperson said in a statement to Mail Online.   

‘We value our partnership with the research community and are appreciative of Eclypsium’s work in this area.’

Bulygin says cloud computing services could be most at risk – and that the flaw would allow hackers to roam freely among the dozens of virtual servers stored on each machine.

The exploit allows hackers to read data from a type of firmware called system management mode memory, which is linked to access rights that control key functions of the machine – from letting administrators configure the system to shutting it down if the processor overloads. 

‘This class of vulnerabilities allows local unprivileged attackers to expose the contents of protected memory by exploiting the microarchitectural capabilities of modern out-of-order CPUs such as caching, instruction pipeline or speculative execution,’ Eclypsium explained.