Preventing Exploitation and Mitigation StrategyĪMD has acknowledged the vulnerability in a recent bulletin. Ultimately, this allows Inception to take control of the CPU. This action creates more powerful transient windows, which can then be exploited to overflow the Return Stack Buffer. Inception disrupts branch prediction during the transient window by introducing fresh predictions into the branch predictor. This manipulation of the CPU’s control flow is the core mechanism exploited by Inception.Ī central component in this attack is the Branch Target Buffer (BTB) and the Return Stack Buffer (RSB). In the exploit context, researchers metaphorically implant an “idea” into the CPU during its “dream-like” state, causing it to execute incorrect instructions. In fact, XDA Developers described that “Inception” takes its name from the movie of the same title, where the central concept involves implanting an idea in someone’s dream. Similar to how they were able to plant an idea to retrieve information, the vulnerability in AMD CPUs can do the same thing. In the simplest of terms, the exploit acts exactly like how Leonardo DiCaprio and his team did in the movie “Inception”. Using an attack method called Training in Transient Execution (TTE), the affected CPUs can be manipulated to believe that they have seen a certain set of instructions before even if it has never happened before. The vulnerability, identified now as “Inception”, takes advantage of speculative execution, a technique where a computer predicts and performs operations it anticipates needing in the future. The vulnerabilities have been identified in CPUs with the Zen 3 and Zen 4 architecture in particular and are present across the board in both desktop and laptop CPUs and APUs with the architecture. Researchers at ETH Zurich have identified a series of vulnerabilities in AMD’s CPUs.
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