Re-volting: AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) undone by electrical attack

guest · Aug 13, 2021

Re-volting: AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization undone by electrical attack
August 13, 2021
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/amd_secure_encrypted_virtualization/

AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) scheme is not as secure as its name suggests.

Boffins from the Technische Universität Berlin have devised an attack that defeats the primary purpose of this silicon safe room technology: protecting the data in virtual machines from rogue administrators in cloud environments.

In a paper titled "One Glitch to Rule Them All: Fault Injection Attacks Against AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization," Robert Buhren, Hans Niklas Jacob, Thilo Krachenfels, and Jean-Pierre Seifert from TU Berlin's Security in Telecommunications group, describe how they succeeded in mounting a voltage fault injection attack.
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This shock to the system allowed them to recover secret encryption keys and execute arbitrary code on all AMD chips with Secure Processors (SP).

"By manipulating the input voltage to AMD systems on a chip (SoCs), we induce an error in the read-only memory (ROM) bootloader of the AMD-SP, allowing us to gain full control over this root-of-trust," the researchers explain in their paper.
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The paper suggest two possible mitigation paths. One involves modifying software or hardware to detect voltage modulation in order to prevent execution in the presence of faults.
The other involves the addition of specific circuitry to defend against voltage glitches.
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Paper: One Glitch to Rule Them All: Fault Injection Attacks Against AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization
(PDF): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.04575

This paper introduces a new approach to attack SEV-protected virtual machines (VMs) by targeting the AMD-SP. We present a voltage glitching attack that allows an attacker to execute custom payloads on the AMD-SPs of all microarchitectures that support SEV currently on the market (Zen 1, Zen 2, and Zen 3).
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