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Downfall (security vulnerability)
Computer security vulnerability From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Downfall, known as Gather Data Sampling (GDS) by Intel,[1] is a computer security vulnerability found in 6th through 11th generations of consumer and 1st through 4th generations of Intel Xeon Scalable x86-64 microprocessors.[2] It is a transient execution CPU vulnerability which relies on speculative execution of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instructions to reveal the content of vector registers.[3][4]
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Vulnerability
Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) security subsystem is also affected by this bug.[4]
The Downfall vulnerability was discovered by the security researcher Daniel Moghimi, who publicly released information about the vulnerability in August 2023, after a year-long embargo period.[5][6]
Intel promised microcode updates to resolve the vulnerability.[1] The microcode patches have been shown to significantly reduce the performance of some heavily-vectorized loads.[7]
Patches to mitigate the effects of the vulnerability have also been created as part of the forthcoming version 6.5 release of the Linux kernel.[8] They include code to disable the AVX extensions entirely on CPUs for which microcode mitigation is not available.[9]
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