Microsoft, Intel, and Google disclose another Spectre-like CPU flaw

May22

by Sindy Cator on May 22, 2018 at 6:02 am

2018 started off on a sour note with the discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre chip-level security flaws, which could be exploited to access secure data on computers powered by the world’s most popular processors. Now, there’s another version doing the rounds. Microsoft and Google have jointly disclosed what’s being called Speculative Store Bypass (variant 4), which, as the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team describes, “could allow an attacker to read older memory values in a CPU’s stack or other memory locations.” Variant 4 uses speculative execution, an optimization technique in CPUs, to potentially expose certain kinds of data. The…