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Cipherleaks is the first demonstrated attack against AMD SEV-SNP


Cipherleaks is the first demonstrated attack against AMD SEV-SNP. It exploits a vulnerable design feature of SEV’s memory encryption and uses the ciphertext of the encrypted VM Save Area (VMSA) as side channels to breach constant-time RSA and ECDSA implementation of the latest OpenSSL library.

For performance optimization, SEV (including SEV-ES and SEV-SNP) does not prevent the hypervisor from read accessing the ciphertext of the encrypted memory. This ciphertext side channel may seem innocuous at first glance, but when applied to certain encrypted memory regions, it may be exploited to infer the execution of the victim VM. In the first attack, we show that the constant-time RSA implementation in OpenSSL can be broken with known ciphertext for the plaintext values of 0 to 31 (which can be easily collected during VM's lifecycle).

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Cipherleaks