A Vulnerability on Intel and AMD CPUs Could Threaten Crypto Owners

A group of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Washington have said that attackers may use a vulnerability called “Hertzleed” to gain access to private keys in cryptographic libraries.

The problem, which was reported by Tom’s Hardware computer department, has been found on Intel’s 8th through 11th generation desktop and notebook chips based on the Core microarchitecture, as well as AMD’s Ryzen chips based on the Zen 2 and Zen 3 architectures.

Intel unveiled its own processor for mining cryptocurrencies earlier this year.

Hertzbleed is a new type of third-party attack based on dynamic frequency management features.

According to the study:

“In the worst case, these attacks allow access to cryptographic keys on remote servers by analyzing the computation time of cryptographic libraries. Such libraries used to be considered tamper-proof.”