GPUs from all major suppliers are vulnerable to new pixel-stealing attack
GPUs from all six of the major suppliers are vulnerable to a newly discovered attack that allows malicious websites to read the usernames, passwords, and other sensitive visual data displayed by other websites, researchers have demonstrated in a paper published Tuesday.
The cross-origin attack allows a malicious website from one domain—say, example.com—to effectively read the pixels displayed by a website from example.org, or another different domain. Attackers can then reconstruct them in a way that allows them to view the words or images displayed by the latter site. This leakage violates a critical security principle that forms one of the most fundamental security boundaries safeguarding the Internet. Known as the same origin policy, it mandates that content hosted on one website domain be isolated from all other website domains.
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The security threats that can result when HTML is embedded in iframes on malicious websites have been well-known for more than a decade. Most websites restrict the cross-origin embedding of pages displaying user names, passwords, or other sensitive content through X-Frame-Options or Content-Security-Policy headers. Not all, however, do. One example is Wikipedia, which shows the usernames of people who log in to their accounts. A person who wants to remain anonymous while visiting a site they don’t trust could be outed if it contained an iframe containing a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main\_Page.
Pixel stealing PoC for deanonymizing a user, run with other tabs open playing video. “Ground Truth” is the victim iframe (Wikipedia logged in as “Yingchenw”). “AMD” is the attack result on a Ryzen 7 4800U after 30 minutes, with 97 percent accuracy. “Intel” is the attack result for an i7-8700 after 215 minutes with 98 percent accuracy.
The researchers showed how GPU.zip allows a malicious website they created for their PoC to steal pixels one by one for a user’s Wikipedia username. The attack works on GPUs provided by Apple, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Arm, and Nvidia. On AMD’s Ryzen 7 4800U, GPU.zip took about 30 minutes to render the targeted pixels with 97 percent accuracy. The attack required 215 minutes to reconstruct the pixels when displayed on a system running an Intel i7-8700.
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Isn't this a browser vulnerability rather than a GPU one?
The article is saying that the gpus use a compression that is software independent and bypasses the restrictions on iFrame cross-website loading. Chrome and Edge are affected; Safari and Firefox are not.
Common Firefox W
Pale Moon actually already protected against this stuff. Because the team are all crazy paranoid.
In other words, this only affects Chromium based browsers.
It's a timing vulnerability, based on how long it takes the GPU to render the page , I think, although it's also browser specific.
But seems low risk.. at a minimum of 30 minutes to grab a username, you'd have to be sat on the same page for a while and not notice your fans ramping up..
Also, passwords seems a stretch. No (sane) site displays passwords.
Many sites have had to enable reveal passwords for people with complicated passwords not using password managers.
It's low risk, but their numbers are also coming from fairly dated hardware and is just proof of concept. It can almost certainly be speed up significantly.
I built my pc to be silent. Case and fans. I would never year the Rams ramping up. But I also use FF shrug
What about the reveal password icon people use for complicated passwords?
The problem is that so many browsers leverage hardware acceleration and offer access to the GPUs. So yes, the browsers could fix the issue, but the underlying cause is the way GPUs handle data that the attack is leveraging. Fixing it would likely involve not using hardware acceleration.
It sounds distantly similar to some of the canvas issues where the acceleration creates different artifacts which makes it possible to identify GPUs and fingerprint the browsers.