Interrupt Injection Attack Exploits Spectre v2 Mitigations in Intel and AMD Processors

A new interrupt injection attack bypasses Spectre v2 mitigations in Intel and AMD CPUs by exploiting timing gaps in branch predictor sanitization. Researchers demonstrated memory leakage on AMD Zen 2 systems, with AMD issuing a patch but Intel deeming mitigation unnecessary.

An unprivileged Linux program can time a hardware interrupt to land in the gap between a processor sanitizing its branch predictor and the kernel using it, re-poisoning the predictor after the defense has run.

MIT CSAIL researchers Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan named the technique INTERRUPT INJECTION. On an AMD Zen 2 machine running Linux 6.14 with every default Spectre v2 mitigation on,

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