GoKawiilResearchers found a way to bypass recent mitigations for Spectre v2 speculative execution side-channel attacks and developed an exploit to leak secrets from Linux machines.
The method works against Spectre v2 defenses on AMD and Intel processors that rely on sanitizing or isolating branch predictors, which researchers generically refer to as neutralization-based mitigations.
Spectre v2 is also known as Branch Target Injection (BTI) and is a variant of the Spectre class of vulnerabilities.
It exploits a processor's indirect branch predictor and causes it to mispredict the target of an indirect branch, leading to speculative execution along an attacker-influenced code path.
Modern processors use branch prediction to guess the most likely execution path and speculative execution to run instructions along that predicted path before the branch outcome is known.
Spectre v2 allows an attacker to manipulate the CPU's indirect branch predictor so that the processor speculatively executes instructions at an attacker-chosen location, which could expose sensitive data.
With neutralization-based mitigations (eIBRS on Intel and Safe RET on AMD), there is a gap between the time the branch predictor is isolated and when it is used by the victim branch.
Active Spectre v2 mitigations assume that an attacker cannot use to their advantage the time between cleaning the branch predictor state and using it.
However, the researchers introduced a primitive that enables re-poisoning the CPU’s state after the cleaning but before it is used.
Daniël Trujillo, a PhD student, and associate professor Mengjia Yan of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) discovered a technique for exploiting this Time-of-Neutralization to Time-of-Use (TONTOU) window to extract sensitive data.
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