FRANKFURT ¨C Daniel Gruss didn¡¯t sleep much the night he hacked his own computer and exposed a flaw in most of the chips made in the past two decades by hardware giant Intel Corp.
The 31-year-old information security researcher and post-doctoral fellow at Austria¡¯s Graz Technical University had just breached the inner sanctum of his computer¡¯s central processing unit and stolen secrets from it.
Until that moment, Gruss and colleagues Moritz Lipp and Michael Schwarz had thought such an attack on the processor¡¯s ¡®kernel¡¯ memory ¡ª which is meant to be inaccessible to users ¡ª was only theoretically possible.
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