Researchers have discovered a vulnerability that would allow hackers to install malware.
Infosecurity Magazine Explains:
Researchers are claiming to have found a way to bypass a widely used defence against attempts to install malware by exploiting operating system or application vulnerabilities.
Address space layout randomization (ASLR) works to defend against a range of attacks by randomizing the locations of code in computer memory.
Now, in their paper, Jump Over ASLR: Attacking Branch Predictors to Bypass ASLR, researchers at the State University of New York and University of California describe a newly discovered flaw in Intel chips which allows them to bypass ASLR.
The researchers were able to launch a so-called 'side channel' attack on a Haswell chip’s branch target buffer (BTB), which resides in the branch predictor part of the CPU.