312-50v12 Exam - Question 176

Question

In an advanced digital security scenario, a multinational enterprise is being targeted with a complex series of assaults aimed to disrupt operations, manipulate data integrity, and cause serious financial damage. As the Lead Cybersecurity Analyst with CEH and CISSP certifications, your responsibility is to correctly identify the specific type of attack based on the following indicators:

The attacks are exploiting a vulnerability in the target system's hardware, inducing misprediction of future instructions in a program's control flow. The attackers are strategically inducing the victim process to speculatively execute instructions sequences that would not have been executed in the absence of the misprediction, leading to subtle side effects. These side effects, which are observable from the shared state, are then utilized to infer the values of in-flight data.

What type of attack best describes this scenario?

Examice · Accepted Answer

The attack described involves exploiting a vulnerability in the target system's hardware that induces errors in the program's control flow, specifically mispredictions, leading to subtle side effects. This method aligns with the characteristics of a Rowhammer Attack, which exploits hardware vulnerabilities to induce bit flips in DRAM (Dynamic Random-Access Memory) cells. Unlike Side-Channel Attacks that typically infer information based on indirect metrics like timing or power consumption, Rowhammer Attacks cause direct hardware-level disruption to manipulate data integrity. Therefore, the correct type of attack in this case is best described as a Rowhammer Attack.

insaniunt · Answer

C. Side-Channel Attack

In this context, the attackers are exploiting a vulnerability in the target system's hardware to observe and infer information based on side-channel information. The side-channel information, in this case, is derived from subtle side effects caused by speculatively executed instructions and mispredictions in the program's control flow.

yicx1 · Answer

A: take advantage of side effect in DRAM hardware design
B: induce victim to visit a malicious site
C: gather extra information (such as timing information or power consumption), rather than directly exploit the target victim
D: upgrade privilege to gain more access

So the answer should be A.

312-50v12 Exam - Question 176

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