Major Vulnerability Found in Intel Chips

Intel has had to fix a massive security flaw known as "Downfall", which was described as a ‘critical weakness found in billions of modern processors’ discovered by security researcher, Daniel Moghimi, from the University of California San Diego.

The vulnerability found was affecting Intel processors released between 2015 and 2019, impacting processors from the 6th Gen Skylake to the 11th Gen Tiger Lake.

Moghimi found that the Downfall vulnerability can allow a hacker to target credentials such as passwords and encryption keys, all available to the hacker if they only shared the same physical CPU core. 

Intel however has released a patch to fix the Downfall vulnerability, but unfortunately, it will result in a significant reduction in performance for certain types of workloads, particularly visualisation engineering.

Moghami predicts that the mitigation overhead could be as high as 50%, depending on the specific workload. Intel has opted to turn on the mitigation by default, while also providing an opt-out mechanism for users who want to disable it.

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