Researchers hide malware in benign apps with the help of speculative execution February 26, 2019 https://www.zdnet.com/article/resea...-apps-with-the-help-of-speculative-execution/ Whitepaper: "ExSpectre: Hiding Malware in Speculative Execution" (PDF - 698 KB): https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ndss2019_02B-5_Wampler_paper.pdf
Interesting stuff indeed. The question is just how viable is an attack using it? POC in a lab environment is a lot different than implemented a working attack scenario against a wide range of processors. One misstep and its blue screen time.
Well, any attack will have to start from somewhere. And you're not going to get this file out of nowhere, you'll need to first download it (and run it). And you bet stuff like google chrome or steam isn't getting its update channel hijacked anytime soon, soooooo the attack vector just isn't there, that's always the problem. You can have a vulnerability that launches nuclear rockets, doesn't ****** matter. Security is so easy, just don't run random stuff and you're good. Or if you do, expect the worst, I use sandboxie for that purpose. Won't stop the nuclear rockets, but it's good enough. In fact sandboxie is my only security software right now, life is so much simpler without the nvt erp prompts and rules or the various excubits drivers that I used before. And I don't have to worry about anything. There's the legit stuff like steam or spotify, and there's the not-so-legit stuff in sandboxie. Life is simple. Literally 0 slowdown on the pc, not even the slightest. Security software is a thing of the past.
