New hardware device can RAM into encrypted memory, expose your data
Attackers would need physical access to the server to pull off the DDR5 trick
Computer security researchers have identified a design flaw in modern encryption hardware that allows access to protected memory in notionally confidential computing environments. But the attacker would need physical access to the victim system.
Boffins affiliated with KU Leuven, ETH Zurich, Durham University, and Google have found that scalable memory encryption hardware fails to check whether the data in memory is fresh.
As a result, they've been able to devise a small hardware interposer, dubbed DDRop, that when wired to an appropriate circuit board, interferes with DDR5 write operations. Unable to tell that memory isn't fresh, a protected VM becomes vulnerable to a replay attack that uses stale, attacker-selected data.
They describe their work in a papertitled, "DDRop: Active Memory Interposer Attacks on Confidential VMs by Dropping DDR5 Writes." Their attack requires physical access...
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