Intel processors are affected by new SPOILER vulnerability

After the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were disclosed last year, the patches involved reduced performance. Unfortunately Intel users are expected to be “losing tremendous performance” this time with the newly discovered SPOILER vulnerability.

SPOILER derives its name from the Speculative (Sp) nature of the exploit. It’s apparently due to a weakness in the memory subsystem of Intel processors, and according to the research paper detailing SPOILER, ARM and AMD processors aren’t affected by this vulnerability.

It appears that the issue will have to be patched via software or firmware for all of Intel’s CPUs since 2008, while upcoming architectures may feature a hardware fix for it. An Intel spokesperson has come forward with the following statement:

Intel received notice of this research, and we expect that software can be protected against such issues by employing side channel safe software development practices. This includes avoiding control flows that are dependent on the data of interest. We likewise expect that DRAM modules mitigated against Rowhammer style attacks remain protected. Protecting our customers and their data continues to be a critical priority for us and we appreciate the efforts of the security community for their ongoing research.

You can read the full research paper detailing SPOILER here.

Pokdepinion: I honestly wonder how much performance are we going to lose once Intel rolls out the patch.