November 9, 2023 at 05:28PM
A lawsuit has been filed against Intel by PC buyers who claim the company failed to address faulty chip instructions that led to the Downfall vulnerability. The lawsuit alleges that Intel knew about the susceptibility of its AVX instruction set to side-channel attacks in 2018 but only fixed the defect after the disclosure of the Downfall hole this year. The plaintiffs argue that they were left with no choice but to apply a patch that slowed performance by up to 50%.
Summary:
Intel has been sued by five PC buyers in a US federal court in California. The plaintiffs claim that Intel knew about the vulnerability of its AVX instruction set to side-channel attacks since 2018 but did not fix the defect until recently, leaving affected computer buyers with no choice but to apply a patch that slows performance by up to 50%. The vulnerability, named Downfall, allows malware or a rogue user to potentially extract sensitive information from memory that should be off-limits. The plaintiffs argue that Intel should have secured AVX back in 2018 but did not, leading to the discovery of Downfall five years later. The lawsuit alleges that Intel did not disclose the existence of certain secret buffers related to the AVX instructions, allowing an attacker to obtain sensitive information from memory. The complaint also mentions other flaws related to AVX. Intel has not commented on the lawsuit.