Hertzbleed - A security FYI

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#1

Embargo lifted a few hours ago, affects alot of machines.
Hertzbleed Attack

Questions and Answers

Am I affected by Hertzbleed?

Likely, yes.

Intel’s security advisory states that all Intel processors are affected. We experimentally confirmed that several Intel processors are affected, including desktop and laptop models from the 8th to the 11th generation Core microarchitecture.

AMD’s security advisory states that several of their desktop, mobile and server processors are affected. We experimentally confirmed that AMD Ryzen processors are affected, including desktop and laptop models from the Zen 2 and Zen 3 microarchitectures.

Other processor vendors (e.g., ARM) also implement frequency scaling in their products and were made aware of Hertzbleed. However, we have not confirmed if they are, or are not, affected by Hertzbleed.

#2

some useful context and applicability discussed here;
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31743110

I’m not a security expert, and this is not security advice, from from what I can determine this is a side-channel attack and thus requires an attacker to be running on the same hardware as the target. For a normal user’s PC this is thus not a concern (or, to put it differently, if you have someone executing arbitrary code on your machine, you already have bigger problems than this.)

It may be a concern for VM’s running on shared hardware, where other users on the same hardware are running this attack.

#3

Well that looks like its going on with this machine here with changes being made to the host windows 10 os and my virtual pc’s even though my virtual pc’s have no networking but malware might be able to exploit the copy and paste pipe that does exist in order to copy files to and from the virtual machine.

Data centres, with virtual (web) servers sound like an ideal testing ground.