Spectre 1.1 and Spectre 1.2 vulnerabilities get disclosed

Two more speculative execution CPU flaws were discovered, the two new strains are called Spectre 1.1 and Spectre 1.2. The former enables attackers to perform a buffer overflow of CPU store cache, to write and run malicious code that captures data from previously-secured CPU memory sections. Spectre 1.1 is very similar to Spectre variant 1 and 4, but at the moment there's no mitigation that protects against Spectre 1.1.

Next we have Spectre 1.2, a vulnerability that enables writing to CPU memory sectors that are usually protected by read-only flags. The new bug impacts both Intel and ARM, and probably AMD too. More about both vulnerabilities can be read at BleepingComputer.

"As a result [of malicious Spectre 1.2 writes], sandboxing that depends on hardware enforcement of read-only memory is rendered ineffective," researchers say.

To exploit, similarly to most previous Meltdown and Spectre bugs, both vulnerabilities require the presence of malicious code on a user's PC, code responsible for running the attack. This somewhat limits the bug's severity, but doesn't excuse sysadmins who fail to apply patches when they'll become available.