First Fully Weaponized Spectre Exploit Discovered Online

A fully weaponized exploit for the Spectre CPU vulnerability was uploaded on the malware-scanning website VirusTotal last month, marking the first time a working exploit capable of doing actual damage has entered the public domain.

The exploit was discovered by French security researcher Julien Voisin. It targets Spectre, a major vulnerability that was disclosed in January 2018.

According to its website, the Spectre bug is a hardware design flaw in the architectures of Intel, AMD, and ARM processors that allows code running inside bad apps to break the isolation between different applications at the CPU level and then steal sensitive data from other apps running on the same system.

The vulnerability, which won a Pwnie Award in 2018 for one of the best security bug discoveries of the year, was considered a milestone moment in the evolution and history of the modern CPU.

Its discovery, along with the Meltdown bug, effectively forced CPU vendors to rethink their approach to designing processors, making it clear that they cannot focus on performance alone, to the detriment of data security.

[…]

But today, Voisin said he discovered new Spectre exploits—one for Windows and one for Linux—different from the ones before. In particular, Voisin said he found a Linux Spectre exploit capable of dumping the contents of /etc/shadow, a Linux file that stores details on OS user accounts.

Such behavior is clearly malicious; however, there is no evidence that the exploit was used in the wild, as it could have also been uploaded on VirusTotal by a penetration tester as well.

[…]

the most interesting part of Voisin’s discovery is in the last paragraph of his blog, where he hints that he may have discovered who may be behind this new Spectre exploit.

“Attribution is trivial and left as an exercise to the reader,” the French security researcher said in a mysterious ending.

But while Voisin did not want to name the exploit author, several people were not as shy. Security experts on both Twitter and news aggregation service HackerNews were quick to spot that the new Spectre exploit might be a module for CANVAS, a penetration testing tool developed by Immunity Inc.

[…]

Source: First Fully Weaponized Spectre Exploit Discovered Online | The Record by Recorded Future

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