The discovery of vulnerabilities in the hardware is allowing to increase the security of the devices. No one is saving themselves from the vulnerabilities, although the biggest hit so far appears to be Intel. And it is that a vulnerability in Thunderbolt ports, a connection interface developed by Intel. This vulnerability has been named Thunderspy and will need to be addressed quickly.
Thunderbolt is a connection interface at the moment, little extended, although it will become standard. The USB4 port will be based on the Thunderbolt interface, so this vulnerability is a problem. It is true that there is time to develop a solution that allows correcting the vulnerability, since USB4 will still take time to implement.
They discover a vulnerability in Thunderbolt
Björn Ruytenberg, a security researcher, was the one who discovered the vulnerability in Thunderbolt. This vulnerability would be easy to exploit under Windows 10 and allows access to port information to be unlocked in 5 minutes. The positive part is that it cannot be done simply, it is quite complicated to exploit.
In order to exploit the vulnerability, we would have to have access to the Thunderbolt port circuitry itself. In addition, you have to connect a special device that has a price of about 600 dollars. Come on, exploiting this vulnerability is not something accessible to everyone and you need physical access to the port at the motherboard level.
The vulnerability appears to be that it cannot be exploited in systems developed from 2019 onwards. This is because Intel instructed manufacturers to implement certain security measures.
This vulnerability in Thunderbolt appears to exploit the operating system's kernel memory direct access protection system. Intel discovered this vulnerability, apparently, long ago and specified security measures. Systems prior to 2019 with Thunderbolt would be affected.
It should be noted that macOS computers would not be affected by this vulnerability.
Source: engadget
