Microarchitectural Data Sampling: New Speculative Execution Side-Channel Vulnerabilities Found in Intel CPUs

On May 14, new set of speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs were revealed by researchers. The researchers have nicknamed (and created logos for) these vulnerabilities ZombieLoad, RIDL and Fallout, while Intel collectively refers to them as Microarchitectural Data Sampling (or MDS).

In addition to the disclosures, software updates from various operating system, virtualization and cloud vendors are available.

The MDS vulnerabilities all focus on the “sampling” of data from CPU buffers that reside between the processor and cache. The term “sampling” here can be described as eavesdropping on the buffers and capturing the data frequently.

To learn more about the MDS attacks as well as Tenable product coverage, please visit our blog.