Exploiting the Conditional Branch Predictor

AMD ID: AMD-SB-7015 **Potential Impact:**N/A Severity: N/A

Summary

Researchers from the University of California San Diego have shared with AMD a paper titled “Pathfinder: High-Resolution Control-Flow Attacks Exploiting the Conditional Branch Predictor” that explores methods for forcing a branch predictor to mis-predict on Intel® CPUs.

No exploit against AMD products is demonstrated in the paper, but AMD recommends following previously published guidance regarding Spectre type attacks: <https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-technical-docs/tuning-guides/software-techniques-for-managing-speculation.pdf&gt;