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Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2108.04575 (cs)
[Submitted on 10 Aug 2021 (v1), last revised 11 Aug 2021 (this
version, v2)]

Title:One Glitch to Rule Them All: Fault Injection Attacks Against
AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization

Authors:Robert Buhren, Hans Niklas Jacob, Thilo Krachenfels,
Jean-Pierre Seifert
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    Abstract: AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) offers
    protection mechanisms for virtual machines in untrusted
    environments through memory and register encryption. To separate
    security-sensitive operations from software executing on the main
    x86 cores, SEV leverages the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP). 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). The
    presented methods allow us to deploy a custom SEV firmware on the
    AMD-SP, which enables an adversary to decrypt a VM's memory.
    Furthermore, using our approach, we can extract endorsement keys
    of SEV-enabled CPUs, which allows us to fake attestation reports
    or to pose as a valid target for VM migration without requiring
    physical access to the target host. Moreover, we
    reverse-engineered the Versioned Chip Endorsement Key (VCEK)
    mechanism introduced with SEV Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP). The
    VCEK binds the endorsement keys to the firmware version of TCB
    components relevant for SEV. Building on the ability to extract
    the endorsement keys, we show how to derive valid VCEKs for
    arbitrary firmware versions. With our findings, we prove that SEV
    cannot adequately protect confidential data in cloud environments
    from insider attackers, such as rouge administrators, on
    currently available CPUs.

Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Cite as:  arXiv:2108.04575 [cs.CR]
          (or arXiv:2108.04575v2 [cs.CR] for this version)

Submission history

From: Robert Buhren [view email]
[v1] Tue, 10 Aug 2021 10:47:47 UTC (421 KB)
[v2] Wed, 11 Aug 2021 10:55:23 UTC (420 KB)
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