A new hack recognized as Hertzbleed can remotely read data snippets from computer chips, effectively making cryptography algorithms vulnerable to attack.
Hertzbleed, a newly found attack that could be used to steal data from computer chips, has attracted the attention of technology security researchers – and also technology news websites. Here’s everything you’ll need to know about the storyline.
What precisely is Hertzbleed?
It is a new computer hack that utilizes power-saving based on the identification of modern computer chips to steal sensitive data. It has been demonstrated in the lab and could be used in the wild by hackers.
Most chips use a technique known as adaptive frequency scaling, also recognized as CPU throttling, to increase or decrease the speed at which instructions are performed. Ramping the CPU’s power up and down to match demand makes it more efficient.
Hackers have repeatedly noted their capacity to read these power signatures and learn about the data being processed. This can serve as a foothold in attempting to break into a machine.
The Hertzbleed team found that you can do something similar remotely by carefully watching how quickly a computer completes certain operations and then employing that information to determine how it is currently throttling the CPU. Demonstrating that such attacks can be managed to carry out remotely exacerbates the problem because remote attacks are much easier for hackers to carry out.
What does it indicate for you?
Intel declined New Scientist’s request for an interview but noted in a security alert that all of its chips are vulnerable to the attack. Based on the company, such an attack “may be able to deduce parts of the information through sophisticated analysis.”
AMD, which is using Intel’s chip architecture, also issued a security alert recognizing several of its mobile, desktop, and server chips as vulnerable to the attack. A request for comment was just not decided to return either by the company.
New Scientist also approached chipmaker ARM, but it did not reply to questions about whether it was working to avoid similar problems with its own chips.
One major issue is that even if your personal hardware is unchanged, you could still be affected by Hertzbleed. Thousands of servers located around the world will store and process your data, archive it, and run the services you rely on daily. Any of these might be running on Hertzbleed-vulnerable hardware.
According to Intel, pilfering even a small amount of data can take “hours to days,” so Hertzbleed is more likely to leak small snippets of data rather than large files, email conversations, and the like. Nevertheless, if that data item is something like a cryptographic key, the consequences can be significant. To the researchers who discovered the flaw, “Hertzbleed is a real, and practical, threat to the security of cryptographic software.”
How really does it’ll get discovered?
A team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Washington in Seattle devised Hertzbleed. They claim that they briefed Intel of their discovery in the third quarter of last year, but that the company sought that it be kept quiet until May of this year – a common request designed to allow a company to fix a flaw before it becomes common knowledge.
Intel allegedly then asked for an extension again till June 14 but has apparently not released a fix for the problem. AMD was made conscious of the problem in the first quarter of this year.
Details of the vulnerability have now been published in a paper on the researchers’ website and will be presented later this summer at the USENIX Security Symposium.
“Side channel power attacks have long been known about,” says Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey in Great Britain. “The story of its discovery and camouflage is a cautionary tale for what else might well be out there.”
Can it be repaired?
Based on the researchers’ website, neither Intel nor AMD are releasing patches to fix the problem. Neither company responded to New Scientist’s questions.
When attacks that started to look for changes in a chip’s speed or frequency were first discovered in the late 1990s, there was a common fix: write code that only used “time-invariant” instructions – that is, instructions that take the same period of time to implement regardless of the data being processed. This precluded an observer from gaining knowledge that’d assist them in reading data. Nevertheless, Hertzbleed can operate around this strategy and can be done remotely.
Because this attack relies on the normal operation of a chip feature rather than on a bug, it may be challenging to fix. The study proposed that turning off the CPU throttling feature on all chips globally would be a solution, but those that warn that doing so would “significantly impact performance” and that it may not be possible to entirely stop frequency changes on some chips.
