Bad news: Another data-leaking CPU flaw. Good news: It's utterly impractical
Boffins in Austria and Germany have devised a power-monitoring side-channel attack on modern computer chips that exposes sensitive data, but very slowly.
The technique is described in a paper, scheduled to be published on Tuesday, titled"Collide+Power: Leaking Inaccessible Data with Software-based Power Side Channels." Collide+Power relies on measuring how power usage varies when processing known data from the attacker and unknown data from the victim, and then inferring the unknown data from differences in those measurements.
"Our central observation is that the mere co-location of data values, eg: attacker and victim data in buffers and caches, in modern CPUs introduces subtle but exploitable power leakage that depends on the combination of both values," the authors, from Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, explain.