SNPeek: Side-Channel Analysis for Privacy Applications on Confidential VMs 

Summary

Customers made us aware of a report titled “SNPeek: Side-Channel Analysis for Privacy Applications on Confidential VMs.”

The researchers’ paper introduces SNPeek, an open-source toolkit that offers configurable side-channel tracing primitives on production AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) hardware, coupled with statistical and machine-learning-based analysis pipelines for automated leakage estimation. The researchers states that using their toolkit  exploits using software based side channels remain observable under a malicious hypervisor model.

AMD’s assessment is that all side-channel techniques demonstrated in the paper fall within the category of already known, documented, and out of scope behaviors according to the published SEV/SNP threat model.  AMD has  introduced features on Zen 5 processors—specifically Ciphertext Hiding and PMC Virtualization—that address the ciphertext visibility and HPC based leakage paths highlighted by the researchers.

AMD recommends software developers employ existing best practices, including constant-time algorithms, and avoiding secret-dependent data accesses where appropriate. 

Affected Products

AMD EPYC™ Series Processors

AMD EPYC™ 7003 Series Processors
AMD EPYC™ 8004 Series Processors
AMD EPYC™ 9004 Series Processors
AMD EPYC™ 9005 Series Processors

AMD EPYC™ Embedded Series Processors

AMD EPYC™ Embedded 7003
AMD EPYC™ Embedded 8004
AMD EPYC™ Embedded 9004
AMD EPYC™ Embedded 9005

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