Yet Another Intel Security Risk Has Been Discovered

Ever since the discovery of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities of Intel chips, the PC world has been on edge. Now, the industry can add yet another security flaw to that list.

The company calls the bug “Lazy FP state restore” while the researchers that discovered the bug call it “LazyFP.” Both cases refer to the same thing, which poses the potential for side channel attacks.

The security flaw was discovered by the joint efforts of Amazon and Cyberus Technologies researchers, Tom’s Hardware reports. They call it “LazyFP” because it directly pertains to CPUs that have lazy floating point unit (FPU) switching. It’s also the latest vulnerability that was discovered pertaining to the second generation of Spectre bugs.

When Intel was made aware of the matter, the company apparently tried to convince the researchers to hold off on disclosing the specifics on the matter. This makes sense since it would want to provide a solution to the problem by the time the public knows of it. Unfortunately for the chip maker, this development has come before it even finished dealing with the first generation of Spectre bugs.

In the case of the “LazyFP,” the disclosure of the flaw was initially scheduled for August. However, fears that rumors regarding the flaw would have given bad actors enough hints to take advantage of it forced the researchers’ hands.

As a result, Intel had to explain exactly what this latest vulnerability is all about and how it affects users, PC Gamer reports. It would appear that the biggest threat is the risk of sensitive information being stolen.

"System software may utilize the Lazy FP state restore technique to delay the restoring of state until an instruction operating on that state is actually executed by the new process. Systems using Intel Core-based microprocessors may potentially allow a local process to infer data utilizing Lazy FP state restore from another process through a speculative execution side channel," Intel revealed.