SEV relies on the Secure Processor (SP), a humble Arm Cortex-A5, to provide a root of trust in AMD EPYC CPUs (Naples, Rome and Milan — Zen…
Why it matters: Researchers from the Technische Universität Berlin have demonstrated that AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualisation (SEV) technology can be defeated by manipulating input voltages, compromising the technology in a similar way to previous attacks against its Intel counterpart. SEV relies on the Secure Processor (SP), a humble Arm Cortex-A5, to provide a root of trust in AMD EPYC CPUs (Naples, Rome and Milan — Zen 1 through 3). The research paper — toting the amusing-yet-wordy title of «One Glitch to Rule Them All: Fault Injection Attacks Against AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization» — describes how an attacker could compromise the SP to retrieve encryption keys or execute arbitrary code. «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.
