All Intel Chips Open To New 'Spoiler' Non-Spectre Attack

Spoiler is the newest speculative attack affecting Intel's micro-architecture. From a report: Like the Spectre and Meltdown attacks revealed in January 2018, Spoiler also abuses speculative execution in Intel chips to leak secrets. However, it targets a different area of the processor called the Memory Order Buffer, which is used to manage memory operations and is tightly coupled with the cache. Researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, and the University of Lubeck in north Germany detail the attack in a new paper, 'Spoiler: Speculative load hazards boost Rowhammer and cache attacks'. The paper [PDF] was released this month and spotted by The Register. The researchers explain that Spoiler is not a Spectre attack, so it is not affected by Intel's mitigations for it, which otherwise can prevent other Spectre-like attacks such as SplitSpectre.

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