side-channel attack

Pierluigi Paganini October 15, 2021
Boffins devise a new side-channel attack affecting all AMD CPUs

A group of researchers from the Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security devised a new side-channel attack that affects AMD CPUs. Researchers Moritz Lipp and Daniel Gruss of the Graz University of Technology and Michael Schwarz of the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security devised a new side-channel attack that […]

Pierluigi Paganini September 13, 2018
Flaws in firmware expose almost any modern PC to Cold Boot Attacks

New Firmware Flaws Resurrect Cold Boot Attacks A team of security researchers demonstrated that the firmware running on nearly all modern computers is vulnerable to cold boot attacks. A team of experts from cybersecurity firm F-Secure has discovered security flaws affecting firmware in modern computers that could be exploited by hackers to carry out cold boot […]

Pierluigi Paganini July 24, 2018
SpectreRSB – new Spectre CPU side-channel attack using the Return Stack Buffer

Researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have devised a new Spectre CPU side-channel attack called SpectreRSB. SpectreRSB leverage the speculative execution technique that is implemented by most modern CPUs to optimize performance. Differently, from other Spectre attacks, SpectreRSB recovers data from the speculative execution process by targeting the Return Stack Buffer (RSB). “rather than exploiting the […]

Pierluigi Paganini March 27, 2018
BranchScope is a new side-channel attack method against Intel chip

  BranchScope is a new side-channel attack technique that like Meltdown and Spectre attacks can be exploited by an attacker to obtain sensitive information from vulnerable processors. A group of researchers from the College of William & Mary, University of California Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, and Binghamton University has discovered a new side-channel attack dubbed […]

Pierluigi Paganini June 24, 2017
Stealing AES-256 keys in seconds using €200 of off-the-shelf components

Security experts at Fox‑IT have demonstrated that is possible sniff AES-256 encryption keys from a distance of one meter (3.3 feet) with a cheap equipment. Security experts at Fox‑IT have demonstrated that is possible to power a side-channel attack to wirelessly extract secret AES-256 encryption keys from a distance of one meter (3.3 feet). The […]

Pierluigi Paganini January 23, 2017
Roughly 200,000 Devices still affected by the Heartbleed vulnerability

More than two years after the disclosure of the HeartBleed bug, 200,000 services are still affected. Systems susceptible to Heartbleed attacks are still too many, despite the flaw was discovered in 2014 nearly 200,000 systems are still affected. Shodan made a similar search in November 2015 when he found 238,000 results, the number dropped to 237,539 […]

Pierluigi Paganini June 04, 2016
How to steal encryption keys from the air through a PC’s noises

A group of Israeli researchers demonstrated how to steal RSA encryption keys through a PC’s noises during cryptographic operations. If you think that air-gapped networks are totally secure you are wrong, in the past, many research teams have devised methods to steal data from computers disconnected from the Internet. They demonstrated that it is possible […]

Pierluigi Paganini December 25, 2015
Spying using Smartwatches and other wearable devices

Wristband and armband devices such as smartwatches and fitness trackers could be used by attackers to spy on you! We have discussed several times about the possibility to exploit IoT devices to spy on individuals. Lack of security by design and poor security settings could open the door to hackers. A Smartwatch or a fitness tracker […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 22, 2015
Spy in the sandbox attack to spy on your online activity

Four security researchers at the Columbia University have developed a new technique dubbed Spy in the sandbox attack to spy on victims’ online activity. Four security researchers at the Columbia University (Yossef Oren, Vasileios Kemerlis, Simha Sethumadhavan, and Angelos Keromytis) have developed a new technique to hack computer using a Javascript that allow them to […]

Pierluigi Paganini August 24, 2014
A new Side channel attack-how to steal encryption keys by touching PCs

Researchers demonstrated a new side channel attack which allow them to steal encryption keys by simply touching a laptop. Yesterday I published a post on an interesting research conducted by a the team of experts which demonstrated an attack exploits “a newly discovered public side channel” allowing threat actor to access the shared memory statistics of an […]