- RS BA1 REMOTE MEMORY CHANNELS PATCH
- RS BA1 REMOTE MEMORY CHANNELS PASSWORD
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Each uses different techniques to trick a processor into temporarily accessing secret information and then encoding it in a processor's cache, a portion of memory designed to keep certain data close at hand for better efficiency.
RS BA1 REMOTE MEMORY CHANNELS SERIES
Spectre, Meltdown, and a series of other "microarchitectural" vulnerabilities that affect microprocessors, for instance, all take advantage of a time-based side channel attack. The phenomenon wouldn't be fully documented in public until 1985, when a computer researcher named Wim van Eck published a paper on what would come to be known as "Van Eck phreaking," reconstructing the images on a computer screen with long-distance detection of the electrical signals it discharges.Īnd computer-focused side channel attacks have only become more sophisticated. The teletype machine was meant to allow secure, encrypted communications, but anyone close enough to read its electromagnetic emissions could potentially decipher its secrets. This, the Bell Labs researchers quickly realized, was a problem. In 1943 Bell Labs discovered that a teletype machine would cause a nearby oscilloscope's readings to move every time someone typed on it. But the more general idea came much earlier: One of the most notorious computer side channel attacks is what the National Security Agency called Tempest. The term "side-channel cryptanalysis" first appeared in 1998, in a paper in which cryptographers at Counterpane Systems and the University of California at Berkeley described how side channel attacks could be used to break encryption systems. The safecracker can sort through that accidental information to learn the combination.
But those tiny tactile and acoustic clues produced by the safe's mechanical physics are a side channel. The safe isn't meant to give the user any feedback other than the numbers on the dial and the yes-or-no answer of whether the safe unlocks and opens. The thief slowly turns the dial, listening for the telltale clicks or resistance that might hint at the inner workings of the safe's gears and reveal its combination. The most basic form of a side channel attack might be best illustrated by a burglar opening a safe with a stethoscope pressed to its front panel.
RS BA1 REMOTE MEMORY CHANNELS PATCH
Look no further than the litany of bugs that Intel and AMD have struggled to patch over the last two years with names like Meltdown, Spectre, Fallout, RIDL, or Zombieload-all of which used side channel attacks as part of their secret-stealing techniques. As computing gets more complicated over time, with components pushed to their physical limits and throwing off unintended information in all directions, side channel attacks are only becoming more plentiful and difficult to prevent. A side channel exploits one of those effects to get more information and glean the secrets in the algorithm."įor a sufficiently clever hacker, practically any accidental information leakage can be harvested to learn something they're not supposed to. When you shift from paper to physics, there are all sorts of physical effects that computation has: time, power, sound. "But computers don’t run on paper, they run on physics. We don’t think about anything else that happens when the program runs," says Daniel Genkin, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan and a leading researcher in side channel attacks.
"Usually when we design an algorithm we think about inputs and outputs.
RS BA1 REMOTE MEMORY CHANNELS PASSWORD
Or that a keyboard's click-clacking can reveal a user's password through sound alone. Or the fact that computer components draw different amounts of power when carrying out certain processes. Side channel attacks take advantage of patterns in the information exhaust that computers constantly give off: the electric emissions from a computer's monitor or hard drive, for instance, that emanate slightly differently depending on what information is crossing the screen or being read by the drive's magnetic head.
And a hacker who learns to read those unintended signals can extract the secrets they contain, in what's known as a "side channel attack." They flit their eyes when they've got a good hand, or raise an eyebrow when they're bluffing-or at least, the digital equivalent. But computers, like poker-playing humans, have tells. Modern cybersecurity depends on machines keeping secrets.