CPU Attack

16.10.2025

RMPocalypse

How a Catch-22 Breaks AMD SEV-SNP (ACM CCS 2025)

ATTACK

CPU

10.07.2025

AMD Transient Scheduler Attacks

AMD discovered several transient scheduler attacks related to the execution timing of instructions under specific microarchitectural conditions while investigating a Microsoft® report titled “Enter, Exit, Page Fault, Leak: Testing Isolation Boundaries for Microarchitectural Leaks”. 

ATTACK

CPU

02.07.2024

High-Precision Branch Target Injection Attacks Exploiting the Indirect Branch Predictor

introduces novel high-precision Branch Target Injection (BTI) attacks, leveraging the intricate structures of the Indirect Branch Predictor (IBP) and the Branch Target Buffer (BTB) in high-end Intel CPUs (Raptor Lake and Alder Lake).

ATTACK

CPU

16.05.2024

Spectre-v2 Attacks UPDATE

On the Limitations of Domain Isolation Against Spectre-v2 Attacks 

ATTACK

CPU

08.05.2024

Pathfinder

Pathfinder: High-Resolution Control-Flow Attacks Exploiting the Conditional Branch Predictor

ATTACK

CPU

10.04.2024

Residual Attack Surface of Cross-privilege Spectre v2

We present InSpectre Gadget, an in-depth Spectre gadget inspector that uses symbolic execution to accurately reason about exploitability of usable gadgets. Our tool performs generic constraint analysis and models knowledge of advanced exploitation techniques to accurately reason over gadget exploitability in an automated way. 

ATTACK

CPU

27.03.2024

ZENHAMMER: Rowhammer Attacks 

on AMD Zen-based Platforms 

ATTACK

CPU

10.12.2023

In-Domain Transient Execution Attack

An in-domain transient execution attack allows a sandboxed adversary to access a secret within the same domain by circumventing software-based access controls.

ATTACK

CPU

10.12.2023

Cross-Domain Transient Execution Attack

A cross-domain transient execution attack5 requires the adversary to find a disclosure gadget in the victim’s domain which, when executed transiently, can transiently access6 and transmit a secret over a covert channel.

ATTACK

CPU

10.12.2023

Domain-Bypass Transient Execution Attack

In a domain-bypass transient execution attack, the adversary executes transient instructions that circumvent hardware-based access controls, allowing access to a secret outside of the adversary’s domain.

ATTACK

CPU

10.12.2023

Transient Execution Attacks

A transient execution attack exploits the microarchitectural side effects of transient instructions, thus allowing a malicious adversary to access information that would ordinarily be prohibited by architectural access control mechanisms.

ATTACK

CPU

08.12.2023

SLAM Attack

SLAM: SPECTRE BASED ON LINEAR ADDRESS MASKING

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CPU

05.07.2020

Dabangg Attack

Modern Intel and AMD processors are susceptible to a new form of side-channel attack that makes flush-based cache attacks resilient to system noise, newly published research shared with The Hacker News has revealed.

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CPU

05.07.2020

'SGAxe' and 'CrossTalk' Side-Channel Attacks

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two distinct attacks that could be exploited against modern Intel processors to leak sensitive information from the CPU's trusted execution environments (TEE).

ATTACK

CPU

27.03.2018

BranchScope Attack

We present BranchScope — a new side-channel attack where the attacker infers the direction of an arbitrary conditional

ATTACK

CPU

29.01.2020

New 'CacheOut' Attack

If your computer is running any modern Intel CPU built before October 2018, it's likely vulnerable to a newly discovered hardware issue that could allow attackers to leak sensitive data from the OS kernel, co-resident virtual machines, and even from Intel's secured SGX enclave.

ATTACK

CPU 

11.12.2019

Plundervolt

Modern processors are being pushed to perform faster than ever before - and with this comes increases in heat and power consumption. To manage this, many chip manufacturers allow frequency and voltage to be adjusted as and when needed. But more than that, they offer the user the opportunity to modify the frequency and voltage through priviledged software interfaces. 

ATTACK

CPU 

20.11.2019

iTLB multihit

iTLB multihit is an erratum where some processors may incur a machine check error, possibly resulting in an unrecoverable CPU lockup, when an instruction fetch hits multiple entries in the instruction TLB. This can occur when the page size is changed along with either the physical address or cache type. A malicious guest running on a virtualized system can exploit this erratum to perform a denial of service attack.

ATTACK

CPU 

20.11.2019

Jump Conditional Code Erratum

Starting with the second-generation Intel® Core™ Processors and Intel® Xeon® E3-1200 Series Processors (formerly codenamed Sandy Bridge) and later processor families, the Intel® microarchitecture introduces a microarchitectural structure called the Decoded ICache (also called the Decoded Streaming Buffer or DSB).

ATTACK

CPU 

13.11.2019

TPM—Fail

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a root of trust for the operating system. TPM is supposed to protect our security keys from malicious adversaries like malware and rootkits. 

ATTACK

CPU 

13.11.2019

TSX Speculative Attack

A new speculative vulnerability called ZombieLoad 2, or TSX Asynchronous Abort, has been disclosed today that targets the Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) feature in Intel processors. 

ATTACK

CPU 

13.11.2019

MDS Attack

The RIDL and Fallout speculative execution attacks allow attackers to leak private data across arbitrary security boundaries on a victim system, for instance compromising data held in the cloud or leaking your data to malicious websites.

ATTACK

CPU 

11.09.2019

NETCAT Attack

NetCAT shows that network-based cache side-channel attacks are a realistic threat. Cache attacks have been traditionally used to leak sensitive data on a local setting (e.g., from an attacker-controlled virtual machine to a victim virtual machine that share the CPU cache on a cloud platform). 

ATTACK

CPU 

07.08.2019

SWAPGS Attack

The SWAPGS Attack, as they call it, circumvents the protective measures that have been put in-place in response to earlier attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown. Still, there is plenty of good news: Microsoft has already released Windows patches for the flaw that makes the attack possible and, even though feasible, the researchers don’t expect the attack to be exploited for widespread, non-targeted attacks. 

ATTACK

CPU 

15.08.2018

TLBLEED

TLBleed is a new side channel attack that has been proven to work on Intel CPU’s with Hyperthreading (generally Simultaneous Multi-threading, or  SMT, or HT on Intel) enabled. It relies on concurrent access to the TLB, and it being shared between threads. We find that the L1dtlb and the STLB (L2 TLB) is shared between threads on Intel CPU cores.

ATTACK

CPU 

15.08.2018

Foreshadow

Foreshadow is a vulnerability that affects modern microprocessors that was first discovered by two independent teams of researchers in January 18, but was first disclosed to the public on 14 August 18.The vulnerability is a speculative execution attack on Intel processors that may result in the loss of sensitive information stored in personal computers, or third party clouds.There are two versions: the first version (original/Foreshadow) (CVE-18-3615) targets data from SGX enclaves; and the second version (next-generation/Foreshadow-NG) (CVE-18-3620 and CVE-18-3646) targets Virtual Machines (VMs), hypervisors (VMM), operating system (OS) kernel memory, and System Management Mode (SMM) memory

ATTACK

CPU 

15.08.2018

Meltdown 

Meltdown is a hardware vulnerability affecting Intel x86 microprocessors, IBM POWER processors, and some ARM-based microprocessors. It allows a rogue process to read all memory, even when it is not authorized to do so. 

ATTACK

CPU 

15.08.2018

Spectre 

Spectre is a vulnerability that affects modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction.On most processors, the speculative execution resulting from a branch misprediction may leave observable side effects that may reveal private data to attackers. For example, if the pattern of memory accesses performed by such speculative execution depends on private data, the resulting state of the data cache constitutes a side channel through which an attacker may be able to extract information about the private data using a timing attack.

ATTACK

CPU 

15.05.2019

ZombieLoad Attack

After Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, we discovered more critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. The ZombieLoad attack allows stealing sensitive data and keys while the computer accesses them. 

ATTACK

CPU Attack

14.05.2019

RIDL and Fallout Attacks 

New attacks extract data from CPU buffers. Two attacks dubbed RIDL and Falloutexploit a set of four vulnerabilities collectively known as Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities - a name given by Intel. The flaws affect Intel CPUs released since 2008, the researchers say.

ATTACK

CPU Attack

14.05.2019

RIDL attack

Researchers from VUSec - the Systems and Network Security Group at Vrije University in Amsterdam, and from the Helmholtz Center for Information Security (CISPA) have developed the RIDL (short for Rogue In-Flight Data Load) attack.

ATTACK

CPU Attack

17.06.2024

ARM 'TIKTAG' attack

TIKTAG: Breaking ARM’s Memory Tagging Extension with Speculative Executi

ATTACK

ARM CPU

         

New 'CacheOut' Attack

If your computer is running any modern Intel CPU built before October 2018, it's likely vulnerable to a newly discovered hardware issue that could allow attackers to leak sensitive data from the OS kernel, co-resident virtual machines, and even from Intel's secured SGX enclave.Dubbed CacheOut a.k.a. L1 Data Eviction Sampling (L1DES) and assigned CVE-2020-0549, the new microarchitectural attack allows an attacker to choose which data to leak from the CPU's L1 Cache, unlike previously demonstrated MDS attacks where attackers need to wait for the targeted data to be available.

Plundervolt

Modern processors are being pushed to perform faster than ever before - and with this comes increases in heat and power consumption. To manage this, many chip manufacturers allow frequency and voltage to be adjusted as and when needed. But more than that, they offer the user the opportunity to modify the frequency and voltage through priviledged software interfaces.

iTLB multihit

iTLB multihit is an erratum where some processors may incur a machine check error, possibly resulting in an unrecoverable CPU lockup, when an instruction fetch hits multiple entries in the instruction TLB. This can occur when the page size is changed along with either the physical address or cache type. A malicious guest running on a virtualized system can exploit this erratum to perform a denial of service attack.

Jump Conditional Code Erratum

Starting with the second-generation Intel® Core™ Processors and Intel® Xeon® E3-1200 Series Processors (formerly codenamed Sandy Bridge) and later processor families, the Intel® microarchitecture introduces a microarchitectural structure called the Decoded ICache (also called the Decoded Streaming Buffer or DSB).

TPM—Fail

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a root of trust for the operating system. TPM is supposed to protect our security keys from malicious adversaries like malware and rootkits.

TSX Speculative Attack

A new speculative vulnerability called ZombieLoad 2, or TSX Asynchronous Abort, has been disclosed today that targets the Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) feature in Intel processors.

MDS Attack

The RIDL and Fallout speculative execution attacks allow attackers to leak private data across arbitrary security boundaries on a victim system, for instance compromising data held in the cloud or leaking your data to malicious websites.

NETCAT Attack

NetCAT shows that network-based cache side-channel attacks are a realistic threat. Cache attacks have been traditionally used to leak sensitive data on a local setting (e.g., from an attacker-controlled virtual machine to a victim virtual machine that share the CPU cache on a cloud platform).

SWAPGS Attack

The SWAPGS Attack, as they call it, circumvents the protective measures that have been put in-place in response to earlier attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown. Still, there is plenty of good news: Microsoft has already released Windows patches for the flaw that makes the attack possible and, even though feasible, the researchers don’t expect the attack to be exploited for widespread, non-targeted attacks.

ZombieLoad Attack

After Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, we discovered more critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. The ZombieLoad attack allows stealing sensitive data and keys while the computer accesses them.

RIDL and Fallout Attacks

New attacks extract data from CPU buffers. Two attacks dubbed RIDL and Falloutexploit a set of four vulnerabilities collectively known as Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities - a name given by Intel. The flaws affect Intel CPUs released since 2008, the researchers say.

RIDL attack

Researchers from VUSec - the Systems and Network Security Group at Vrije University in Amsterdam, and from the Helmholtz Center for Information Security (CISPA) have developed the RIDL (short for Rogue In-Flight Data Load) attack.

TLBLEED

TLBleed is a new side channel attack that has been proven to work on Intel CPU’s with Hyperthreading (generally Simultaneous Multi-threading, or  SMT, or HT on Intel) enabled. It relies on concurrent access to the TLB, and it being shared between threads. We find that the L1dtlb and the STLB (L2 TLB) is shared between threads on Intel CPU cores.

Foreshadow

Foreshadow is a vulnerability that affects modern microprocessors that was first discovered by two independent teams of researchers in January 18, but was first disclosed to the public on 14 August 18.The vulnerability is a speculative execution attack on Intel processors that may result in the loss of sensitive information stored in personal computers, or third party clouds.There are two versions: the first version (original/Foreshadow) (CVE-18-3615) targets data from SGX enclaves; and the second version (next-generation/Foreshadow-NG) (CVE-18-3620 and CVE-18-3646) targets Virtual Machines (VMs), hypervisors (VMM), operating system (OS) kernel memory, and System Management Mode (SMM) memory

Meltdown

Meltdown is a hardware vulnerability affecting Intel x86 microprocessors, IBM POWER processors, and some ARM-based microprocessors. It allows a rogue process to read all memory, even when it is not authorized to do so.

Spectre

Spectre is a vulnerability that affects modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction.On most processors, the speculative execution resulting from a branch misprediction may leave observable side effects that may reveal private data to attackers. For example, if the pattern of memory accesses performed by such speculative execution depends on private data, the resulting state of the data cache constitutes a side channel through which an attacker may be able to extract information about the private data using a timing attack.

BranchScope Attack

We present BranchScope — a new side-channel attack where the attacker infers the direction of an arbitrary conditional branch instruction in a victim program by manipulating the shared directional branch predictor