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A couple of German boffins have taken a good look at AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), and don't like what they see.
As AMD's Brijesh Singh explained to the Linux driver project mailing list in April, SEV extends the AMD-V architecture when multiple VMs are running under a hypervisor: "SEV hardware tags all code and data with its VM ASID which indicates which VM the data originated from or is intended for. This tag is kept with the data at all times when inside the SOC, and prevents that data from being used by anyone other than the owner".
In this paper at Arxiv, Felicitas Hetzelt and Robert Buhren of the Technical University of Berlin identify shortcomings in the architecture, including possible encryption bypass, information leakage, and memory replay attacks.
[...] "The key idea of SEV is that guest memory is encrypted and the corresponding key is only accessed by the memory controller that handles the encryption and decryption transparently, thereby protecting against both a malicious hypervisor and physical attacks," they write. "This key will never be exposed to the hypervisor. Additionally AMD added a coprocessor to SEV-enabled CPUs ... This coprocessor handles key management and is responsible for the initial encryption of the guest."
[...] The good news is that all of the attacks need a malicious hypervisor – meaning customers can trust AMD SEV if they trust their cloud operator. Although they consider the design issues to be serious, the researchers note that "the technology is promising" if mitigations are possible.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by mcgrew on Friday December 09 2016, @02:47AM
Boffins only exist in Britain, in Germany they're called Wissenschaftler, and sane, non-silly English speaking people call them "scientists".
And that stupid Register is a joke site, folks! How about some REAL sites, like Hacker's News [ycombinator.com] or threatpost? [threatpost.com]
What, you're going to cite the National Enquirer next? A serious subject needs a serious source, and El Reg is anything but serious.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by takyon on Friday December 09 2016, @03:13AM
They have original reporting. They have exclusive interviews. They have fresh analysis. They have their own podcast and they also fly balloons into the stratosphere [theregister.co.uk]. They are not the National Enquirer or this month's new flavor, known as "fake news". Your opinion is baseless and stale.
I can only assume that as a "D-list" [wikipedia.org] author, you have chosen to lash out at The Register's superior humor by picking the easiest target imaginable: their habitual use of the word boffin, detested by other weak SoylentNews users. Good for you. Maybe I'll submit an El Reg article every day for the next year.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday December 09 2016, @05:28PM
True, but they also leave key facts out of an unsensational story to sensationalize it. Not really fake news, but damned close. It's simply an untrustworthy source.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday December 09 2016, @03:19PM
Shockingly, the submitter actually forgot to say "this came from 'El Reg.'"
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday December 09 2016, @08:31PM
The word sounds like a bird species. So when I hear the word boffin, I picture a puffin [wikipedia.org] in a lab coat.