Researchers have demonstrated the “first native Spectre v2 exploit” for a new speculative execution side-channel flaw that impacts Linux systems running on many modern Intel processors.
Spectre V2 is a new variant of the original Spectre attack discovered by a team of researchers at the VUSec group from VU Amsterdam.
The researchers also released a tool that uses symbolic execution to identify exploitable code segments within the Linux kernel to help with mitigation.
The new finding underscores the challenges in balancing performance optimization with security, which makes addressing fundamental CPU flaws complicated even six years after the discovery of the original Spectre.
