TONTOU Bypasses Spectre v2 Mitigations, Leaks Linux Password Hashes in 18 Minutes

On August 6, 2026, MIT CSAIL researchers unveiled at Black Hat USA a new CPU attack that bypasses Spectre v2 fixes on both Intel and AMD processors. TONTOU exploits the gap between branch predictor neutralization and its actual use, extracting `/etc/shadow` at 5.47 bytes per second with 91.97% accuracy.