Intel's new chip flaw leaves your PC exposed again

Intel chips have another flaw that could allow skilled hackers to extract sensitive information microprocessors, said Tuesday independent researchers in the field of security.

The researchers say that a flaw in the microprocessors is vulnerable to four new attacks, each of which can capture information such as encryption keys and passwords, basic elements of security for the computer. rest of your computer. The research was previously reported by Wired, who said the flaw was affecting millions of PCs.

Many researchers spread across more than a dozen different organizations have published their findings on the rift on Tuesday. The fault is in the same family as the Failure and defects of Spectrum announced in 2018, and it has some similarities. First, it affects the data stored on your chip that the hardware stores to perform tasks faster. In addition, the new flaw requires hackers to run malware on your device before they can steal information on the chip.

The announcement indicates that this type of defect, which was new when reports on Meltdown and Specter were first announced, is an area of ​​intense research, and experts could continue to find serious chip defects on the road. Intel and other chip manufacturers are faced with the challenge of solving the vulnerabilities that allow this type of attack without sacrificing the performance of their microprocessors.

In a statement, Intel said the best way to protect against attacks against this vulnerability is to keep your system software up-to-date. The vulnerability has been corrected on the Intel Core processors of the 8th and 9th generation, as well as on the 2nd generation of the Intel Xeon Scalable processor family. The other chips can be corrected with software updates called microcode, which solve the problem without having to rewrite the hard-coded functions of a microprocessor.

The company has also released data on how bug fixes affect the performance of different processors.