A new side-channel vulnerability has been discovered called PortSmash that uses a timing attack that to steal information from other processes running in the same CPU core with SMT/hyper-threading enabled. Utilizing this attack, researchers were able to steal the private decryption key from an OpenSSL thread running in the same core as their exploit. SMT/Hyper-threading is when one physical CPU core is split into two virtual logical cores that can be used to run two separate process threads at once. This method can increase performance as the two threads will utilize idle CPU resources more efficiently to execute instructions faster. A side channel timing attack is when an attacker analyzes how fast a thread executes particular instructions and utilizes that information to work backward to discover what data was used as input. The PortSmash vulnerability was discovered by researchers Billy Bob Brumley, Cesar Pereida Garcia, Sohaib ul Hassan, and Nicola Tuveri from the Tampere University of Technology in Finland and Alejandro Cabrera Aldaya from the Universidad Tecnologica de la Habana CUJAE in Cuba.  An advisory was made to the OSS-Sec mailing list and their research has been submitted as a paper titled "Port Contention for Fun and Profit" as an IACR eprint, which is currently awaiting moderation before it's released. Learn more on this security update by visiting OUR FORUM.