Exploiting Unprotected I/O Operations in AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization

Explore a conference talk from USENIX Security '19 that delves into the vulnerabilities of AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology. Learn about new attack vectors introduced by the lack of trust in privileged software for SEV-enabled virtual machines. Discover how unprotected I/O operations can be exploited to breach confidentiality and integrity. Examine the construction of two attack primitives against SEV's memory encryption schemes: a memory decryption oracle and a memory encryption oracle. Understand how these primitives enable adversaries to decrypt and encrypt arbitrary messages using the memory encryption keys of virtual machines. Gain insights into the evaluation of these attacks and potential solutions to address the underlying security issues in SEV technology.