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RMPocalypse Vulnerability in AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization

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2 unique sources, 2 articles

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Academic researchers from ETH Zurich discovered a vulnerability in AMD processors that affects the integrity of confidential computing. The flaw, named RMPocalypse, allows a malicious hypervisor to corrupt the Reverse Map Table (RMP) during initialization, compromising the security guarantees of AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP). The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-0033, impacts multiple AMD EPYC and EPYC Embedded series processors. AMD has released patches to OEMs, and Microsoft is working on updates for Azure Confidential Computing's AMD-based clusters. Supermicro has also acknowledged the vulnerability and will require BIOS updates for impacted motherboard SKUs. The RMPocalypse exploit enables attackers to break confidentiality and integrity guarantees of SEV-SNP, potentially allowing for debug access, fake attestation, VMSA state replay, and code injection. The exploit can be triggered by a single 8-byte write to the RMP, resulting in a full breach of confidentiality and integrity guarantees of SEV-SNP.

Timeline

  1. 14.10.2025 13:52 2 articles · 10h ago

    RMPocalypse Vulnerability in AMD SEV-SNP Disclosed

    The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-0033, impacts multiple AMD EPYC and EPYC Embedded series processors, including the 7003, 8004, 9004, and 9005 Series Processors. The exploit can be triggered by a single 8-byte write to the RMP, resulting in a full breach of confidentiality and integrity guarantees of SEV-SNP. Supermicro has acknowledged the vulnerability and will require BIOS updates for impacted motherboard SKUs.

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Battering RAM Attack Bypasses Intel and AMD Cloud Security Protections

A group of academics from KU Leuven and the University of Birmingham have demonstrated a new vulnerability called Battering RAM. This vulnerability bypasses the latest defenses on Intel and AMD cloud processors, compromising Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) and AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP). The attack leverages a custom-built, low-cost DDR4 interposer hardware hack to stealthily redirect physical addresses and gain unauthorized access to protected memory regions. The vulnerability affects systems using DDR4 memory, particularly those relying on confidential computing workloads in public cloud environments. Successful exploitation can allow a rogue cloud infrastructure provider or insider with limited physical access to compromise remote attestation and enable the insertion of arbitrary backdoors into protected workloads. The vulnerability was reported to the vendors earlier this year, but defending against Battering RAM would require a fundamental redesign of memory encryption itself. The attack is an evolution of the previous BadRAM attack, which exploited physical address aliasing to modify and replay encrypted memory on AMD SEV-SNP systems. The Battering RAM attack introduces dynamic memory aliases at runtime, allowing it to bypass Intel's and AMD's mitigations for BadRAM. Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University have demonstrated a new attack called WireTap that also bypasses Intel's SGX security guarantees. WireTap uses a DDR4 memory-bus interposer to passively decrypt sensitive data, exploiting Intel's deterministic encryption. The WireTap attack can extract an SGX secret attestation key, allowing an attacker to sign arbitrary SGX enclave reports. WireTap and Battering RAM attacks are complementary, focusing on confidentiality and integrity respectively. WireTap can be used to undermine confidentiality and integrity guarantees in SGX-backed blockchain deployments. Intel and AMD have acknowledged the exploits but consider physical attacks on DRAM out of scope for their current products. Intel's cryptographic integrity protection mode of Intel Total Memory Encryption-Multi-Key (Intel TME-MK) can provide additional protection against alias-based attacks. The researchers' exploits demonstrate that confidential computing is not invincible, and defenders should reevaluate threat models to better understand and prepare for physical attacks.

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WeepSteel Malware Deployed via Sitecore Zero-Day Exploit

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