New Spectre v2 Variant Exposes Data on Intel, AMD and Arm CPUs

Researchers from the VUSec group and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna disclosed a new Spectre v2 variant called Branch Target Reuse (BTR). It affects systems powered by Intel, AMD and Arm CPUs and targets JIT compilers used by operating system kernels, web browsers and runtimes. An attacker able to run code on a targeted machine could steal sensitive data from memory, such as password hashes. The researchers demonstrated Linux kernel attacks that leaked the root password hash.