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Comment by tischler | Hacker News Reader

How was this bug independently discovered by three research teams (Graz University of Technology, Google's Project Zero, Cyberus Technology)? Was it known beforehand that such an attack or a similar one could be possible in theory such that all teams came up the same idea?

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CPU side-channel attacks have been an active area of research for years. Here's an incomplete list of papers. "by 2016 it got crazy so this is nowhere near complete" https://twitter.com/csirac2/status/948575368956411904

csirac2's list on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/securityengineering/comments/7o2uzy...

The article suggests that all the research teams were inspired by one source: The team quickly got in touch with Intel and learned that other researchers - inspired in part by Fogh’s blog - had made similar discoveries.

This is the blog article: https://cyber.wtf/2017/07/28/negative-result-reading-kernel-...

But this blog is written in 07/28 last year, Google reports this bug back in 06/01, right?

Yes. The timeline mentioned is the timeline for others, not Google.

Backstory: https://twitter.com/tehjh/status/948737135007424512

Original paper (which I actually read when it first came out earlier this year): http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~dima/micro16.pdf

First PoC for leaking ASLR based on timing side-channel attack: https://github.com/felixwilhelm/mario_baslr

As others have said, the groundwork was already in place and it was an active topic of research. On top of that, responsible disclosure practices mean that other teams don't know when the first team makes their breakthrough, since nothing is published at that stage, so they have the opportunity to independently make the discovery.

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