Enlarge / An uncovered Intel Core i5-3210M (BGA) inside of a laptop. (credit: Köf3)

The vulnerability—discovered and privately reported to Intel 12 months ago—resided in every CPU Intel has introduced since at least its Ivy Bridge line of processors and possibly earlier, a researcher from security firm Bitdefender told Ars. By abusing a performance capability known as speculative execution, attackers could open a side channel that leaks encryption keys, passwords, private conversations, and other secrets that are normally off limits.

The attack demonstrated in a research paper published by Bitdefender is similar to those disclosed in January 2018 under the names Spectre and Meltdown. Patches Microsoft released around the same time largely blunted those attacks.