Spectre flaw still haunts Intel and AMD chips, putting security at risk

Researchers from ETH Zurich have discovered new vulnerabilities in Intel and AMD processors, six years after the Spectre security flaws were first identified.

The new Spectre variant, named “Post-Barrier Spectre,” allows attackers to bypass critical security barriers and access sensitive information, such as hashed passwords, despite earlier mitigations designed to prevent such attacks.

The research, conducted by Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi of ETH Zurich University, points out weaknesses in the Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier (IBPB), a defense mechanism introduced to protect against Spectre v2 attacks. Despite Intel and AMD’s efforts to fix previous vulnerabilities, the researchers were able to bypass IBPB and retrieve sensitive data, such as “the hash of the root password from a suid process” on recent Intel chips.