At the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, a team of researchers just let the cat out of the bag about a new vulnerability affecting a very popular RISC-V CPU. The so-called GhostWrite attack affects the XuanTie C910 and C920 CPUs by Chinese chip company T-Head. The flaw allows attackers to gain root access or even pull the administrator password from system memory.
The researchers, from CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany, unveiled the flaw and noted several devices susceptible to it. While they say the vulnerability does not yet appear to be exploited in the wild, it’s a serious issue. Most of the CPU attacks found in recent years have been side-channel or transient execution attacks, but that’s not the case with GhostWrite.
