Physical Memory Fault Injection Attacks on DDR5

Summary

Researchers reported a physical attack technique that they say can potentially undermine the integrity guarantees of AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) on systems using DDR5 memory. According to their report, an adversary who has privileged software access and physical access to the motherboard can insert a t hardware device between the processor and a DDR5 memory module.

AMD has assessed this report and has determined that the described technique relies on a physical attack against the memory bus, which falls outside the scope of the published threat model for SEV-SNP. AMD does not plan to assign a CVE or release mitigations in response to this report.  For more information about the protections offered by SEV-SNP, please see AMD SEV-SNP: Strengthening VM Isolation with Integrity Protection and More

Affected Products

AMD EPYC™ 4004 Series Processors
AMD EPYC™ 4005 and AMD EPYC™ 4005 Embedded Series Processors
AMD EPYC™ 8004 and AMD EPYC™ 8004 Embedded Series Processors
AMD EPYC™ 9004 and AMD EPYC™ 9004 Embedded Series Processors
AMD EPYC™ 9005 and AMD EPYC™ 9005 Embedded Series Processors
AMD Instinct™ MI300A Series Processors 

Acknowledgement 

AMD thanks the following for reporting and engaging in coordinated vulnerability disclosure:

Jesse De Meulemeester (COSIC, KU Leuven)
Patrick Jattke (ETH Zurich)
Stefan Gloor (ETH Zurich)
Ingrid Verbauwhede (COSIC, KU Leuven)
Martin Thompson (Durham University & ZF)
David Oswald (Durham University)
Kaveh Razavi (ETH Zurich)
Jo Van Bulck (DistriNet, KU Leuven)

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