Vulnerability discovered in performance optimization feature of Intel CPUs

Months ago, security researchers disclosed the Meltdown and Spectre CPU security vulnerabilities and as we expected, this was just the beginning of a whole new level of security issues.

More vulnerabilities have been found in the past couple of months, and now security researchers discovered that "lazy FP state restore", a performance optimization feature in all modern Intel Core and Xeon processors since Sandy Bridge, can be used to access sensitive information.

The "lazy FP state restore" feature is a set of commands used to temporarily store or restore the FPU states of applications running "lazily" (as opposed to "eagerly"). Red Hat put out an advisory stating that numbers held in FPU registers could be used to access sensitive information about the activities of other applications, including encryption keys.

Intel acknowledges the issue and gave it a "moderate" severity rating. The chip giant is working with operating system vendors to roll out patches. It's unknown if this will result in another performance hit.

Via: TPU