A NOVEL SIDE-CHANNEL ATTACK THAT UTILIZES MEMORY RE-ORDERINGS

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

Memory DisOrder is a timerless side-channel attack that exploits memory re-orderings in relaxed memory models to infer cross-process activity on mainstream CPUs (X86/Arm/Apple) and GPUs (NVIDIA/AMD/Apple). The technique demonstrated covert channels achieving up to 16 bits/second with 95% accuracy on Apple M3 GPU, reliable DNN architecture fingerprinting, and potential throughput of nearly 30K bits/second on X86 CPUs when exploiting low-level system details. Organizations should monitor for emerging mitigations as this vulnerability class, which affects parallel processing units, becomes better understood.