Monday, May 17th 2021
Two New Security Vulnerabilities to Affect AMD EPYC Processors
AMD processors have been very good at the field of security, on par with its main competitor, Intel. However, from time to time, researchers find new ways of exploiting a security layer and making it vulnerable to all kinds of attacks. Today, we have information that two new research papers are being published at this year's 15th IEEE Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT'21) happening on May 27th. Both papers are impacting AMD processor security, specifically, they show how AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) is compromised. Researchers from the Technical University of Munich and the University of Lübeck are going to present their papers on CVE-2020-12967 and CVE-2021-26311, respectfully.
While we do not know exact details of these vulnerabilities until papers are presented, we know exactly which processors are affected. As SEV is an enterprise feature, AMD's EPYC lineup is the main target of these two new exploits. AMD says that affected processors are all of the EPYC embedded CPUs and the first, second, and third generation of regular EPYC processors. For third-generation EPYC CPUs, AMD has provided mitigation in SEV-SNP, which can be enabled. For prior generations, the solution is to follow best security practices and try to avoid an exploit.
Source:
AMD Security
While we do not know exact details of these vulnerabilities until papers are presented, we know exactly which processors are affected. As SEV is an enterprise feature, AMD's EPYC lineup is the main target of these two new exploits. AMD says that affected processors are all of the EPYC embedded CPUs and the first, second, and third generation of regular EPYC processors. For third-generation EPYC CPUs, AMD has provided mitigation in SEV-SNP, which can be enabled. For prior generations, the solution is to follow best security practices and try to avoid an exploit.
39 Comments on Two New Security Vulnerabilities to Affect AMD EPYC Processors
Previously we had a discussion with similar topic, point is that security vulnerabilities are important even if they are only "case studies", so that we can decide to disable certain features to minimize impact.
Consumer chips are unaffected.
Intel doesn't have it, or maybe icelake-x brought it, either way it's really fresh so we were mostly fine before, but as said it's a selling point for cloud vendors "we cannot snoop anymore" or wait, we can by using these cve's.
time will tell, but this should tell people what it's about
The truth
"The exploits mentioned in both papers require a malicious administrator to have access in order to compromise the server hypervisor."
So you need admin priv to make system insecure...lmao
From the original- " While our approach is also applicable to traditional virtualization environments, its severity significantly increases with the attacker model of SEV-ES."
LMAO! How can it be more severe if you already have admin privelidge? TOTAL BS
Here's a list of Intel Xeon cpu's that are vulnerable as well.
ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search/featurefilter.html?productType=873&2_VTX=true