March 13, 2024 at 06:33AM
A team of researchers from IBM and VU Amsterdam unveiled a new data leakage attack, GhostRace, affecting major CPU makers and software. The attack exploits speculative race conditions, allowing attackers to access sensitive information from memory. The researchers shared details of the attack, notified vendors, and released a proof-of-concept exploit and scanning scripts.
Based on the meeting notes, the key takeaway is the disclosure of a new type of data leakage attack called GhostRace, which impacts all major CPU makers and some widely used software. The attack leverages speculative race conditions (SRCs) and allows threat actors to obtain potentially sensitive information from memory, such as passwords and encryption keys. The attack requires physical or privileged access to the targeted machine and practical exploitation is in most cases not trivial. The researchers have made available a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit, scripts for scanning the Linux kernel for SCUAF gadgets, and a list of the gadgets they have identified, and the CVE identifier CVE-2024-2193 has been assigned to the underlying GhostRace vulnerability. The impacted major hardware vendors, including Intel, AMD, Arm, and IBM, have been notified, as well as OS and hypervisor vendors. AMD and the Xen hypervisor developers have published advisories, and Linux developers have implemented an IPI rate limiting feature to address the vulnerability.