GhostWrite: New T-Head CPU Bugs Expose Devices to Unrestricted Attacks
A team of researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany has disclosed an architectural bug impacting Chinese chip company T-Head's XuanTie C910 and C920 RISC-V CPUs that could allow attackers to gain unrestricted access to susceptible devices.
The vulnerability has been codenamed GhostWrite. It has been described as a direct CPU bug embedded in the hardware, as opposed to a side-channel or transient execution attack.
"This vulnerability allows unprivileged attackers, even those with limited access, to read and write any part of the computer's memory and to control peripheral devices like network cards," the researchers said.
GhostWrite renders the CPU's security features ineffective and cannot be fixed without disabling around half of the CPU's ...