It was 2 years ago that we learned about Spectre and Meltdown, the first speculative attacks to CPUs which exploit hardware “bugs” and in particular the speculative and out-of-order execution features in modern CPUs. In the last 2 years a long list of attacks followed these initial two, and CacheOut is the last one.

CacheOut, here its own website and here an article about it, builds and improves over previous attacks and countermeasures like microcode updates provided by the CPUs makers, and Operating System patches. The CacheOut attack allows, in Intel CPUs, to read data from other processes including secret encryption keys, data from other Virtual Machines and the contents of the Intel’s secured SGX enclave.

Besides the effective consequences of this attack and the availability and effectiveness of  software countermeasures, it is important to remember that the only final solution to this class of attacks is the development and adoption of new and redesigned hardware CPUs. This will probably take still a few years and in the meantime we should adopt countermeasures based on risks’ evaluation so to isolate critical data and processes to dedicated CPUs or entire computers.