Today we're going to talk about two new vulnerabilities that have been discovered affecting Intel and AMD CPUs. These are called Downfall and Inception and they are both related to the infamous Meltdown and Spectre bugs that rocked the industry a few years ago. But how serious are these new threats and what can you do to protect yourself?
Let's find out, what are Downfall and Inception? Downfall and Inception are two new vulnerabilities found in Intel and AMD processors, respectively. They both exploit a feature called Speculative Execution, which is a technique that allows CPUs to perform faster by guessing what instructions will be executed next, and executing them in advance.
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Today we're going to talk about two new vulnerabilities that have been discovered affecting Intel and AMD CPUs. These are called Downfall and Inception and they are both related to the infamous Meltdown and Spectre bugs that rocked the industry a few years ago. But how serious are these new threats and what can you do to protect yourself? Let's find out, what are Downfall and Inception? Downfall and Inception are two new vulnerabilities found in Intel and AMD processors, respectively. They both exploit a feature called Speculative Execution, which is a technique that allows CPUs to perform faster by guessing what instructions will be executed next, and executing them in advance. However, this also allows attackers to access sensitive data stored in the CPU's memory. or registers by tricking the CPU into speculating on the wrong instructions. Downfall and Inception are classified as medium severity threats, potentially enabling information disclosure or data corruption. Still, they are not as easy to exploit as Meltdown and Spectre were. So who discovered Downfall and Inception? Downfall was found by Google security researcher Daniel Moghimi, who published a paper describing the vulnerability and how it can be exploited using um, Gather data sampling, abbreviated GDS, and gather value injection, abbreviated GVI, techniques. Inception was discovered by security researchers at ETH Xerox Cosmic Group who also published a paper detailing the vulnerability and how it can be exploited using Vector Register Sampling, VRS. Both reports were presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May 2023. So which processors are affected by downfall and inception? Downfall affects most Intel processors produced from 2015 and newer, including Skylake, Kabylake, Whiskeylake, Icelake, Cometlake, Coffeelake, Rocketlake, and Tigerlake generations. However, Intel's newest 12th and 13th generation chips based on Alder Lake And Raptor Lake are not affected. Also low end CPUs such as Celeron, Pentium, and Apollo are not affected either. Inception involves a range of AMD processors, including Ryzen, Epic, and Threadripper generations. However, AMD's newest six generation chips based on Zen 4 architecture are not affected. How can downfall and inception be exploited? Downfall and inception require local access to the target system. Meaning the attacker has to run malicious code on the same machine as the victim. Somebody could trick a user into downloading or opening a malicious file or application, or compromising another process on the system with access to the CPU's memory or registers. The attacker could then use GDS, GVI for downfall, or VRS for inception, to leak arbitrary data from the CPU's internal state during speculative execution. This could include passwords, encryption keys, personal information, or any other sensitive data stored or processed by the CPU. So how can you protect yourself from downfall and inception? The good news is that Intel and AMD have already issued software updates to mitigate these OS level vulnerabilities at OS level. microcode patches that modify the behavior of the CPU. to prevent or reduce the impact of speculative execution attacks. However, these updates may only be automatically applied to your system if you have enabled automatic updates or manually checked for updates. Therefore, it is recommended that you update your system as soon as possible to ensure you are protected from these threats. You can also check your system's vulnerability status using tools such as Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool. Or AMD processor security. Additionally, you should also be careful about what files or applications you download or open on your system and avoid clicking on suspicious links or attachments. And that's it for this tech tip. I hope you learned something about these vulnerabilities. Follow the steps to take to protect yourself from these vulnerabilities.