SLAM Attack: A Major Security Flaw Threatens Intel, AMD, and Arm CPUs

Researchers have discovered a new side-channel attack called SLAM that exploits a feature in Intel CPUs called Linear Address Masking (LAM), as well as similar features in AMD and Arm CPUs. SLAM allows an attacker to leak sensitive information from kernel memory, including the root password hash. The attack increases the Spectre attack surface and impacts current and future CPUs from Intel, AMD, and Arm. AMD and Intel are working on mitigations, while Arm states that its systems already mitigate against Spectre v2. Linux maintainers have developed patches to disable LAM by default.