AMD’s Epyc is a major advance in security

Minimalist · Jun 22, 2017

AMD’s Zen core has been revealed in detail but with Epyc the company added a few juicy details. SemiAccurate is particularly interested in the security aspects on the new CPU line which is what we will discuss here.
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http://semiaccurate.com/2017/06/22/amds-epyc-major-advance-security/

Minimalist · May 26, 2018

Epyc fail? We can defeat AMD's virtual machine encryption, say boffins

German researchers reckon they have devised a method to thwart the security mechanisms AMD's Epyc server chips use to automatically encrypt virtual machines in memory.

So much so, they said they can exfiltrate plaintext data from an encrypted guest via a hijacked hypervisor and simple HTTP requests to a web server running in a second guest on the same machine.
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https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/25/amd_epyc_sev_vm_encryption_bypass/

Rasheed187 · Jun 2, 2018

Minimalist said: ↑

Epyc fail? We can defeat AMD's virtual machine encryption, say boffins

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/25/amd_epyc_sev_vm_encryption_bypass/
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Rogue hypervisors will always be a problem, but I assume there is a way to block them from being loaded?

Minimalist · Jul 10, 2018

China producing x86 chips nearly identical to AMD server processors

Thanks to a licensing deal with AMD and a complex joint-venture arrangement, the Chinese chip producer Chengdu Haiguang IC Design Co. (Hygon) is now producing x86-based server processors that are largely indistinguishable from AMD's EPYC processors—so close in design that Linux kernel developers had to do little in the way of patching to support the new processor family, called "Dhyana." The server chips are being manufactured for domestic use only—part of an effort to break China's dependence on foreign technology companies.
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https://arstechnica.com/information...ps-nearly-identical-to-amd-server-processors/

guest · Jun 26, 2019

Vulnerability in AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization for EPYC: Update Now to Build 22
June 26, 2019
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1458...irtualization-for-epyc-update-now-to-build-22

[...] a researcher at Google found a vulnerability in the way AMD’s EPYC processors provide Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) which would allow an attacker to recover a secure key that would provide access between previously isolated VMs on a system. AMD has since released an update to the firmware which patches this issue.

The SEV feature relies on elliptic-curve cryptography for its secure key generation, which runs when a VM is launched.
[...] Due to the algorithm involved, [...] an attacker could gather enough data to reassemble the private key of the system.
More details are provided in the full disclosure documentation, which indicates that SEV firmware version 0.17 build 11 and earlier are vulnerable.

This vulnerability was found by Cfir Cohen as part of the Google Cloud security team, and carries the CVE-2019-9836 designation. AMD’s response to this issue can be found on its security website.
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AMD Product Security

Secure Encrypted Virtualization Invalid ECC Curve Points (CVE-2019-9836)
6/25/19

At AMD, security remains a top priority and we continue to work to identify any potential risks for our customers. Through ongoing collaboration with industry researchers AMD became aware that, if using the user-selectable AMD secure encryption feature on a virtual machine running the Linux operating system, an encryption key could be compromised by manipulating the encryption technology’s behavior. AMD released firmware-based cryptography updates to our ecosystem partners and on the AMD website to remediate this risk.
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guest · Jul 11, 2019

AMD's SEV tech that protects cloud VMs from rogue servers may as well stand for... Still Extremely Vulnerable
Evil hypervisors can work out what apps are running, extract data from encrypted guests
July 10, 2019
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/10/amd_secure_enclave_vulnerability/

In a paper [PDF] presented Tuesday at the ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Auckland, New Zealand, [...] detail two novel attacks that can undo the privacy of protected processor enclaves.

The paper, "The SEVerESt Of Them All: Inference Attacks Against Secure Virtual Enclaves," describes techniques that can be exploited by rogue cloud server administrators, or hypervisors hijacked by hackers, to figure out what applications are running within an SEV-protected guest virtual machine, even when its RAM is encrypted, and also extract or even inject data within those VMs.
As a result, the paper calls into question the confidentiality promises of cloud service providers.

"By passively observing changes in the registers, an adversary can recover critical information about activities in the encrypted guest," the researchers explain in their paper.
The researchers recommend the IBS subsystem be changed so that guest readings are discarded when secure encrypted virtualization is enabled.
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The SEVerESt Of Them All: Inference Attacks Against Secure Virtual Enclaves (PDF - 1.38 MB): https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/07/10/amd.pdf

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