Foreshadow: The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities continue to haunt microprocessor manufacturers Intel and AMD. After the initial revelations, Intel expressed hope that the security vulnerabilities would remain dormant.
Unfortunately, this did not happen, as immediately after the revelation of Spectre and Meltdown, new processor security vulnerabilities are constantly being discovered. Foreshadow is one of the latest security vulnerabilities discovered and we will examine it in more detail below.
What does the Foreshadow vulnerability do?
Foreshadow, also known as L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF). This is the latest vulnerability discovered in Intel Core processors. The public announcement of Foreshadow lists a total of three vulnerabilities affecting Intel processors.
The first concerns Intel Security Extensions (SGX), a feature available in Intel's 7th generation chips. Ironically, these chips were designed to provide additional code protection against unauthorized modifications.
The other two vulnerabilities affect almost all other generations of Intel CPUs.
Watch a demo of an attack:
Foreshadow is the result of an independent collaborative security research effort by two different groups: imec-DistriNet at KU Leuven and a larger team consisting of the University of Michigan, the University of Adelaide and CSIRO's Data61.
"What our attack does is it uses techniques that are similar to the Meltdown attacks of six months ago," says Professor Thomas Wenisch from the University of Michigan.
"But we discovered that we can specifically target a lock box in Intel processors. With that, we can leak any data we want."
In short: The Foreshadow vulnerability allows access to information held in a computer's memory. Intel's technical manuals state that memory areas can be marked as off-limits, but the opposite is true. By adding malicious code to a machine, a virtual machine or a cloud server, attackers can gain access to memory areas that normally shouldn't be accessible because they contain very sensitive data.
The three Foreshadow vulnerabilities have been listed under different CVE codes:
CVE-2018-3615, CVE-2018-3620 , and CVE-2018-3646.
Intel's CVE description page lists a full list of platforms potentially affected by the Foreshadow vulnerabilities.
Check the list for your CPU model.
Is my computer at risk from Foreshadow?
Make sure your system is up to date. The research teams that discovered Foreshadow disclosed all the details to Intel back in January. This gave Intel plenty of time to develop and release patches.
Furthermore, the researchers and Intel say that such attacks are extremely rare. The expertise and cost required to carry out this attack make it nearly impossible for attackers of the series to replicate. Phishing techniques are much easier to use and almost cost-effective for the hacking community.
For more technical details , see the vulnerability page.
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