New Intel CPU flaws leak sensitive data from privileged memory

A newly disclosed Intel CPU hardware vulnerability (CVE-2024-45332, “Branch Privilege Injection”) allows speculative branch predictor updates to cross user/kernel privilege boundaries, enabling an unprivileged attacker to leak kernel and privileged memory; ETH Zurich demonstrated a proof-of-concept on Ubuntu that read /etc/shadow with up to 5.6 KB/s and high accuracy. Intel has released microcode mitigations (with modest performance overhead) and recommends BIOS/OS updates; researchers will publish full technical details at USENIX Security 2025.