Intel's Hyper-Threading tech, not safe

NEW DELHI: According to an online report, Colin Percival, a 23-year-old Ph.D. student from Vancouver claims to have found a security problem with Intel Corp.'s Hyper-Threading Technology (HTT).

Taking advantage of the vulnerability, unprivileged users can get access to passwords and also steal an RSA private key being used on the machine based on HTT.

In his presentation Colin writes, "Hyper-Threading, as currently implemented on Intel Pentium Extreme Edition, Pentium 4, Mobile Pentium 4, and Xeon processors, suffers from a serious security flaw."

Hyper-Threading Technology allows multi-threaded applications to execute threads in parallel on a single CPU. Collin in his paper has explained how a malicious thread can access areas of memory being used by other threads and get secret information from there. Administrators of multi-user systems have been warned to disable Hyper-Threading immediately.