New Interrupt Injection Attack Can Bypass Spectre v2 Defenses on Intel and AMD CPUs
New Interrupt Injection Attack Can Bypass Spectre v2 Defenses on Intel and AMD CPUs
06 August 2026
An unprivileged Linux program can time a hardware interrupt to land in the gap between a processor sanitizing its branch predictor and the kernel using it, re-poisoning the predictor after the defense has run.
MIT CSAIL researchers Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan named the technique INTERRUPT INJECTION. On an AMD Zen 2 machine running Linux 6.14 with every default Spectre v2 mitigation on,