Attack bypasses AMD protection promising security, even when a server is compromised.

On Tuesday, an international team of researchers unveiled BadRAM, a proof-of-concept attack that completely undermines security assurances that chipmaker AMD makes to users of one of its most expensive and well-fortified microprocessor product lines. Starting with the AMD Epyc 7003 processor, a feature known as SEV-SNP—short for Secure Encrypted Virtualization and Secure Nested Paging—has provided the cryptographic means for certifying that a VM hasn’t been compromised by any sort of backdoor installed by someone with access to the physical machine running it.

  • @Tangent5280English
    34•16 hours ago

    My favorite computer vulnerability is when a state actor kidnaps me and attaches high voltage jumpers to my ballsack with the threat of frying them if I don’t give up my NFT seed phrase.

    My second favorite vulnerability is when a common robber steals my Daddy Tate Tokens from my shadow encrypted, quantum hardened disk by breaking my kneecaps with a $5 wrench.

    • @mPonyEnglish
      9•12 hours ago

      My favorite computer vulnerability is when a state actor kidnaps me and attaches high voltage jumpers to my ballsack with the threat of frying them if I don’t give up my NFT seed phrase

      There’s no need to bring your OnlyFans subscriptions into this discussion. You do you.

    • SerenadeEnglish
      11•16 hours ago

      There’s an XKCD reference in there, I’m sure of it

  • @WagnasTEnglish
    85•21 hours ago

    Looks like AMD has already patched it, also appears to affect older Intel versions of the same tech concept but not current generations.

    Only really affects guests in multi tenant hypervisor environments, requires physical access to the hypervisor, requires external physical hardware, requires booting the host with said hardware attached, at some point this level of compromise is already absurd. This kind of research is important and shows that we still need to limit out level of trust with host providers but I don’t think anyone needs to panic.

    • Dark ArcEnglish
      36•17 hours ago

      Kinda annoyed with Ars for perpetuating this trend of dramatized security vulnerability names and descriptions.

      • BakkodaEnglish
        7•12 hours ago

        Ars went the way of Toms a while ago for me. There’s some decent stuff to be found but most of it is click/rage bait.

        • Dark ArcEnglish
          2•10 hours ago

          I still think it’s generally more good than bad and I appreciate they provide an authenticated ad free RSS feed for subscribers, but I think this was one of their worst headlines.

    • @Tangent5280English
      17•17 hours ago

      If someone breaks into your home and shits your pants then they might be able to make you smell like shit.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•16 hours ago

        Legit question: is the “he/she shits your pants” expression and generally shit verbiage own vogue or something?

        I have to ask because I keep seeing it and I’m pretty sheltered from corporate social media (and probably larger Internet cultural trends overall).

  • LostXOR
    23•20 hours ago

    I’m not really surprised, common wisdom is if someone malicious has hardware access to a machine it’s compromised. And if you don’t trust your hosting provider to not tamper with your machine, you should really find a new provider (or buy your own server).

    • @[email protected]English
      4•9 hours ago

      The “trusted execution environment” thing was an attempt to make the system less vulnerable to exploitation through physical access. As we can see, it works about as well as expected.