SLAM Attack New Spectre-based Vulnerability Impacts Intel, AMD, and Arm CPUs
09-Dec-23
A novel side-channel attack known as SLAM has been revealed by researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This attack has the potential to leak confidential data from kernel memory on Intel, AMD, and Arm CPUs that are now on the market and those that are coming soon.
Using a new feature in Intel CPUs called Linear Address Masking (LAM) and its equivalent equivalents from AMD (called Upper Address Ignore, or UAI) and Arm (called Top Byte Ignore, or TBI), the attack is an end-to-end exploit for Spectre.
The root password hash might be leaked from kernel memory in a matter of minutes, according to VUSec researchers, who noted that SLAM “exploits unmasked gadgets to let a userland process leak arbitrary ASCII kernel data.”
