Protected Virtual Machines Exposed to New ‘CacheWarp’ AMD CPU Attack
14-Nov-23
Researchers have revealed the specifics of a novel attack technique that targets an AMD processor security feature, highlighting the potential danger to protected virtual machines (VMs).
Researchers from the Graz University of Technology in Austria, the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany, and independent researcher Youheng Lu identified the attack technique, which they termed CacheWarp.
AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), a CPU extension created to isolate virtual machines (VMs) from their underlying hypervisor at the hardware level so that developers can safely deploy VMs even in the event that the hypervisor is untrusted, is impacted by CacheWarp. AMD SEV protects virtual machine (VM) data by encrypting register state and memory.
