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Intel And Hyperthread Hacking
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-05-16
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Talk about reading between the lines. Security guru, Colin Percival, said he's found a heavy-duty flaw in a number of Intel's current line of processors. Percival said also that once hackers got in, they could tap a whole network and wreak havoc.
Percival said on his website:
Hyper-Threading, as currently implemented on Intel Pentium Extreme Edition, Pentium 4, Mobile Pentium 4, and Xeon processors, suffers from a serious security flaw. This flaw permits local information disclosure, including allowing an unprivileged user to steal an RSA private key being used on the same machine. Administrators of multi-user systems are strongly advised to take action to disable Hyper-Threading immediately; single-user systems (i.e., desktop computers) are not affected.
Intel responded saying that this isn't such a critical flaw as the hacker would already need some kind of way in and also that future operating systems should correct the flaw.
Percival first picked up on the problem back in Oct. of 2004. He promptly began testing and worked with FreeBSD and he's been working on up until Friday, when he released his findings.
In EWeek, he said:
"How the attack is used would depend entirely upon the environment. In the case of a multi-user server where users login via SSH, a legitimate user could log in, provoke the SSH daemon into performing a private key operation using the host key, and then steal that key and use it to impersonate the server in order to steal other users' login credentials," he wrote in the e-mail. "Another attack could occur on shared servers which run HTTPS; this attack would allow one user of the server to steal the SSL certificates belonging to other users' Web sites."
He states on his website that most home computer users shouldn't have a problem as this would primarily affect servers. The biggest real issue he says would be internally at a corporation perhaps. Someone who wants a whole into a company server might have a way in with this. The chances are remote but enough to where he felt it needed to be addressed.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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