a multi-university and industry research team led by computer scientists at the University of California San Diego has discovered two new types of attacks that target the conditional branch predictor found in high-end Intel processors. These attacks could be exploited to compromise billions of processors currently in use, potentially exposing confidential data. The researchers’ work, to be presented at the 2024 ACM ASPLOS Conference, reveals a unique attack that is the first to target a feature in the path history register (PHR