Pathfinder: The Groundbreaking Microarchitectural Control-Flow Extraction Attack and its Impact on Cybersecurity

Kazem Taram, an assistant professor of computer science at Purdue University and a UC San Diego computer science PhD graduate, stated that Pathfinder represents the most accurate and powerful microarchitectural control-flow extraction attack that has been seen so far. The research involved collaboration with UC San Diego coauthors Dean Tullsen, Hosein Yavarzadeh, Archit Agarwal, and Deian Stefan. Additional coauthors included Christina Garman and Daniel Moghimi from Purdue University, Daniel Genkin from Georgia Tech, and Max Christman and Andrew Kwong from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

The study was supported by various organizations, including the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and donations from Intel, Qualcomm, and Cisco. This backing helped to advance the exploration and understanding of microarchitectural control-flow extraction.

Responsible disclosure practices were followed by notifying Intel and AMD of the security findings in November 2023. Intel subsequently alerted other affected hardware/software vendors of the issues. Both Intel and AMD committed to addressing the concerns raised in the paper by issuing a Security Announcement and a Security Bulletin (AMD-SB-7015), respectively. The findings were also shared with the Vulnerability Information and Coordination Environment (VINCE) under Case VU#157097, which pertains to a class of attack primitives that enable data exposure on high-end Intel CPUs. This collaborative effort highlights the importance of ethical and transparent communication in addressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities.