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Retbleed is a speculative execution attack on x86-64 and ARM processors, including some recent Intel and AMD chips.[1][2] First made public in 2022, it is a variant of the Spectre vulnerability which exploits retpoline (return trampoline), which was a mitigation for speculative execution attacks.[3]
According to the researchers, Retbleed mitigations require extensive changes to the system which results in up to 14% and 39% performance loss on Linux for affected AMD and Intel CPU respectively.[4] The PoC works against Intel Core 6th, 7th and 8th generation microarchitectures and AMD Zen 1, Zen 1+, and Zen 2 microarchitectures.
An official document from ARM informs that all ARM CPUs affected by Spectre are also affected by Retbleed.[2]
Windows is not vulnerable because the existing mitigations already tackle it.[1]Linux kernels 5.18.14 and 5.19 contain the fixes.[5][6] The 32-bit Linux kernel, which is vulnerable, will not receive updates to fix the issue.[7]