ARM CPUs Face Threats From New Variant of Spectre Vulnerability

The ARM architecture-based processors may face new cyberthreats due to the discovery of a new vulnerability. This vulnerability is said to be a variant of the Specter vulnerability, the infamous bug discovered in January 2018 that could lead to speculative execution side-channel attacks on widely-used modern processors.

The Straight-Line Speculation bug

• In June 2020, a new vulnerability dubbed Straight-Line Speculation (SLS) was discovered in the Armv8-A (Cortex-A) CPU architecture of ARM processors.
• It allows attackers to steal the additional branches of computations made by the processor in advance (i.e. speculative execution that fastens up the processor speed), via a side-channel attack.
• The bug, tracked as CVE-2020-13844, may sound like a critical threat, but the company said that it is difficult to exploit it in the wild, and there are no practical threats demonstrated so far.

Read more.