Researchers contradict AMD claims that SEV keys can't be extracted remotely

Date:
Tue, 24 Aug 2021 13:29:20 +0000

Description:
Security researchers say the AMD attack described in their paper has serious real world implications.

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Security researchers have overruled claims from AMD that recent findings concerning the chip giant's security processes do not pose a real-world threat.

The Technische Universitt (TU) Berlin's Security in Telecommunications group recently published a research paper that demonstrated a means to defeat AMD's SEV mechanism in a voltage fault injection attack they refer to as a
glitching attack.

AMD said the report, which described means to extract encryption keys from Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV)-enabled CPUs, had little real-world implication since it requires physical access to a server . Take a look at
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Robert Buhren, one of the authors of the paper, contacted TechRadar Pro to dismiss AMDs supposition, and instead claims that the attacker needs to have physical access to any arbitrary Epyc CPU, and not necessarily to the CPU
that executes the targeted virtual machines (VM).

A malicious admin could buy the CPU somewhere and use the extracted keys on systems in the data-center. IMHO, this makes the attack much more dangerous
as no physical tampering with machines in the data center is required, Buhren told us. Real world implications

Further explaining the real-world implications of their research, Buhren adds that the attack they describe enables attackers to use keys extracted from
one AMD Epyc CPU to attack VMs running on any other AMD CPU as long as it is based on the same microarchitecture.

In our paper we specifically describe an attack scenario that allows an attacker to decrypt a SEV protected VM's memory without physical access to
the system hosting the VM, asserts Buhren.

Buhren further points to his teams earlier research paper, in which they had published proof-of-concept (PoC) code , which enabled a malicious administrator to mount the kind of attack thats described in their current research.

The PoC shows how an attacker can use the keys from one AMD processor to extract a SEV-protected VM's memory inside a data center.

He explains that their most recent glitching attack makes it possible to extract details from all three generations of Zen CPUs, in essence enabling the PoC to work on all AMD processors that support SEV.

Even more worryingly, Buhren claims that since the glitching attack isnt a firmware issue, itll work regardless of whether AMD publishes updated
firmware or not.

AMD hasnt yet responded to TechRadar Pro s email requesting for comment on Buhrens assertions. Protect your devices with these best antivirus software



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/researchers-contradict-amd-claims-that-sev-keys -cant-be-extracted-remotely/


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