Following on from the revelation in January that 2 major security flaws are present in nearly all modern processors, security researchers have now found 8 more potentially serious flaws.
Eight?
According to reports by German tech news magazine c’t, the 8 new security flaws in chips / processors were discovered by several different security teams. The magazine is reported to have been given the full technical details of the vulnerabilities by researchers and has been able to verify them.
The new ‘family’ of bugs have been dubbed Spectre Next Generation (Spectre NB), after the original Spectre bug that was made public along with the ‘Meltdown’ bug at the beginning of the year.
90 Days To Respond
The researchers who discovered the bugs have followed bug disclosure protocols, and have given chip-makers and others 90 days to respond and to prepare patches before they release details of the bugs. The 90 day time limit ran out on Monday 7th May.
Co-ordinated Disclosure
Intel is reported to have been reluctant to simply acknowledge the existence of the bugs, preferring to have what it calls a ‘co-ordinated disclosure’, presumably near the end of the protocol time limit, when there has been time to prepare patches and to mitigate any other issues.
It is not yet clear if AMD processors are also potentially vulnerable to the Spectre-NG problems.
How Serious Are The Flaws?
There have been no reports, as yet, of any of the 8 newly-discovered flaws being used by cyber-criminals to attack firms and extract data. According to the magazine C’t, however, Intel had classified half of the flaws as “high risk”, and the others as “medium risk”.
It is believed that one of the more serious flaws could provide a way for attackers access a vulnerable virtual computer, and thereby reach the server behind it, or reach other software programs running on that machine. It has been reported that Cloud services like Amazon’s AWS may be at risk from this flaw.
Meltdown and Spectre
The original Meltdown and Spectre flaws were found to have been present in nearly all modern processors / microchips, meaning that most computerised devices are potentially vulnerable to attack, including all iPhones, iPads and Macs.
Meltdown was found to leave passwords and personal data vulnerable to attacks, and could be applied to different cloud service providers as well as individual devices. It is believed that Meltdown could affect every processor since 1995, except for Intel Itanium and Intel Atom before 2013.
Spectre, which was found to affect Intel, AMD and ARM (mainly Cortex-A) processors, allows applications to be fooled into leaking confidential information. Spectre affects almost all systems including desktops, laptops, cloud servers, and smartphones.
What Does This Mean For Your Business?
The discovery of a family of 8 more flaws on top of the original 2 ‘Spectre’ and ‘Meltdown’ flaws is more bad news for businesses, particularly when they are trying to make things as secure as possible for the introduction of GDPR. Sadly, it is very likely that your devices are affected by the several or all of the flaws because they are hardware flaws at architectural level, more or less across the board for all devices that use processors. The best advice now is to install all available patches and make sure that you are receiving updates for all your systems, software and devices.
Although closing hardware flaws using software patches and updates is a big job for manufacturers and software companies, it is the only realistic and quick answer at this stage to a large-scale problem that has present for a long time, but has only recently been discovered.
Regular patching is a good basic security habit to get into anyway. Research from summer 2017 (Fortinet Global Threat Landscape Report) shows that 9 out of 10 impacted businesses are being hacked through un-patched vulnerabilities, and that many of these vulnerabilities are 3 or more years old, and there are already patches available for them.