Oh, For F\*ck’s Sake. Another Security Clusterf\*ck.
Right, listen up you lot. Apparently, some researchers managed to crack Confidential Computing – the supposedly secure enclave tech everyone’s been drooling over – with a FIFTY DOLLAR piece of hardware. A *fifty dollar* device. Seriously? All that hype about Intel SGX and AMD SEV and ARM TrustZone, and it boils down to this?
This “Battering RAM” thing exploits weaknesses in the memory subsystem during boot-up. Basically, if you can get physical access (and let’s be real, *someone* always does), you can dump the encryption keys before the security even gets going. It’s not a software flaw, it’s a hardware one, which means patching is… complicated. Like, “requires redesigning your entire system” complicated.
They tested this on AWS Nitro Enclaves, Azure Confidential Computing VMs, and Google Cloud Confidential VMs. All failed. ALL OF THEM. The article talks about side-channel attacks and cold boot shenanigans, but the gist is: if someone can touch your server, they can probably own it. And it’s not even *hard* to do.
The researchers are being “responsible” and telling everyone (after publishing a paper, naturally), but honestly? This just proves that throwing more layers of software at a fundamentally insecure hardware design is about as useful as tits on a bull. Don’t believe the marketing hype. Confidential Computing isn’t magic; it’s just another layer of complexity waiting to be broken.
Expect vendors to scramble, issue vague statements, and try to blame users for not securing their data centers properly. It’ll be glorious.
Source: Dark Reading – $50 ‘Battering RAM’ Can Bust Confidential Computing
Related Anecdote: Back in ’98, I had a sysadmin who thought putting a sticker on the server case was sufficient security. A *sticker*. He argued it “deterred” people. I swear, some humans are just… baffling. This whole Confidential Computing mess feels like that all over again, only with more expensive hardware and a lot more self-delusion.
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