New Plundervolt attack impacts Intel CPUs

guest · Dec 10, 2019

New Plundervolt attack impacts Intel CPUs
Intel desktop, server, and mobile CPUs are impacted. Intel has released firmware patches today
December 10, 2019
https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-plundervolt-attack-impacts-intel-cpus/

Academics from three universities across Europe have disclosed today a new attack that impacts the integrity of data stored inside Intel SGX, a highly-secured area of Intel CPUs.

Academics say they discovered that by tinkering with the amount of voltage and frequency a CPU receives, they can alter bits inside SGX to cause errors that can be exploited at a later point after the data has left the security of the SGX enclave.
They say Plundervolt can be used to recover encryption keys or introduce bugs in previously secure software.

For example, Plundervolt can be used to induce bugs in the encryption algorithms/operations performed inside SGX, resulting in encrypted content that's easy to crack once it leaves the SGX enclave, allowing attackers to recover the encryption key that was used to encrypt the data in the first place.

"Because SGX only encrypts the data when read from/written to memory (but not inside the CPU), SGX's memory protection does not prevent these errors (since the faulty values themselves are written to memory)," he added.
However, Oswald told ZDNet that Plundervolt attacks aren't particularly intrusive, and are usually safe.
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PLUNDERVOLT IS NOT A REMOTE ATTACK
But despite sounding like a really bad bug, Plundervolt is not as severe as it sounds. For starters, Oswald tells ZDNet that Plundervolt can't be exploited remotely, such as luring a user to a website and executing the attack via JavaScript.

Nonetheless, Plundervolt is a serious issue. The research team said it notified Intel in June, and the vendor has worked tirelessly to prepare patches.
Microcode and BIOS updates were released today as part of security advisory INTEL-SA-00289
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