From PC World: Move over, Meltdown and Spectre. A new “Foreshadow” attack, alternatively called L1 Terminal Fault or L1TF, targets Intel’s Security Guard Extensions (SGX) within its Core chips.
You should be safe, though, if you’ve already patched your PC as part of the earlier Spectre and Meltdown mitigations that rolled out over the course of the year, according to a blog post from Intel, which disclosed the flaw today. (Wired has more of the technical backstory on the bug itself, and Intel has published a video explaining the issue.) Microsoft is also rolling out patches, Intel said.
Security Guard Extensions, or SGX, were originally designed to protect code from disclosure or modification, according to Intel. It’s a feature that’s included in 7th-generation Core chips and above, as well as the corresponding Xeon generation. According to Intel, it “remains protected even when the BIOS, VMM, operating system, and drivers are compromised, implying that an attacker with full execution control over the platform can be kept at bay.”
That apparently isn’t totally the case. Wired hypothesized that the Foreshadow bug could break down the walls between virtual machines, a real concern for cloud companies whose services share space with other theoretically isolated processes.
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