GPUs are vulnerable to side-channel attacks (the same kinds of attacks as Meltdown and Spectre)

[TechyBen]

5 hours ago, colonel_mortis said:

To be clear, the attack allows an attacker to detect when the browser has rendered a new frame, as well as some properties of it (such as the size of the repainted area). That allows the attacker to guess, for example, that you appear to be typing into a password field. They can then measure the time between each keystroke, which has been shown to reveal some information about the keys that were pressed. It doesn't actually disclose the password, but it does reveal the length and a non-zero amount of information about the content.

 

The paper can be found at http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~zhiyunq/pub/ccs18_gpu_side_channel.pdf. It's pretty readable, though it is 15 pages (the interesting parts are pages 6-11).

Yes. This is the thing about side channel attacks. They are all about math and statistics. You can then, practically, side channel anything that is "useable". As to be useable, it needs some form of quick access. Accessing quickly, means you get some form of data quickly. Then you can do timing "channel" attacks.

 

Mitigating it all is hard. And the best you can do is make it take too long. As with 256bit keys etc meaning it takes "heat death of the universe" to crack... or a 2000 bit q-bit computer. XD

[Doobeedoo]

How great, two of the main processor components can be vulnerable hardware side. Hopefully and eventually everything gets fixed on hardware level so we don't have to worry about this.

[mr moose]

11 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

How great, two of the main processor components can be vulnerable hardware side. Hopefully and eventually everything gets fixed on hardware level so we don't have to worry about this.

 

There's really no point in worrying about it anyway,  All hardware and software is exploitable in someway.  The only difference is we know about this one.

 

Someone earlier smartly likened it to the worm in the apple problem,  if you get half way through eating an apple, what's worse? discovering half a worm, a whole worm or no worm?

[pas008]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

 

There's really no point in worrying about it anyway,  All hardware and software is exploitable in someway.  The only difference is we know about this one.

 

Someone earlier smartly likened it to the worm in the apple problem,  if you get half way through eating an apple, what's worse? discovering half a worm, a whole worm or no worm?

yup and look how this is worded here from op

 

 

A malicious app uses OpenGL to create a spy program to infer the behavior of the browser as it uses the GPU. The spy program can reliably obtain all allocation events of each website visited to see what the user has been doing on the web and possibly extract login credentials