Spectre Attacks – A Matter of Time

Did you know there is a hacking vulnerability that affects billions of computers worldwide? It’s called Spectre, and its not just a single attack, but a whole class of them.

First reported in 2018, Spectre allows an attacker to potentially access sensitive information stored in a computer's memory, such as passwords, cryptographic keys, and other sensitive data.

Spectre attacks work by exploiting a feature of modern processors called speculative execution. This is a technique that allows the processor to "speculate" on what instructions it might need to execute next, and execute them in advance in order to improve performance. However, this can leave temporary data in the processor's cache, which an attacker can potentially access using a side-channel attack.

Google’s security blog recently warned that Spectre attacks against websites are still a serious threat. And in 2022, a new subclass of Spectre attacks dubbed Retbleed, was shown to affect AMD and Intel CPUS. Further, new lines of attack can demolish current defenses because those only protect the processor in a later stage of speculative execution.

The worst part, a successful Spectre attack may leave no traces of unauthorized data access at all.

So what can we do about Spectre? First off, don’t simply trust that your cloud provider has you covered. Spectre primarily attacks multi-tenant systems, so whether your cloud vendor is AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, or others, they may be vulnerable.

The good news is, encryption of data in process and memory makes speculative execution attacks like Spectre much harder to execute successfully. Recently my colleague Sean Grimaldi, who served at the CIA for over 13 years, wrote an article about two methods for encryption of data in use.

One of those methods, confidential computing, is employed by VectorZero’s Active Data Vault? product. This method safeguards your data from Spectre attacks without notable performance loss. Furthermore, it does not require any meaningful change to user tools, behaviors, or existing systems.

And beyond confidential computing, Active Data Vault? does so much more. It automates, orchestrates, and simplifies complex cybersecurity functions into a unified program. With 3 simple clicks, your data can be fortressed against Spectre, Zero-day attacks, provider threats, insider threats, supply chain vulnerabilities, advanced persistent threats, quantum computer attacks, RAM scraping, and more.

Contact VectorZero to learn more.

By Andrew Blume

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