Attack bypasses AMD protection promising security, even when a server is compromised.
On Tuesday, an international team of researchers unveiled BadRAM, a proof-of-concept attack that completely undermines security assurances that chipmaker AMD makes to users of one of its most expensive and well-fortified microprocessor product lines. Starting with the AMD Epyc 7003 processor, a feature known as SEV-SNP—short for Secure Encrypted Virtualization and Secure Nested Paging—has provided the cryptographic means for certifying that a VM hasn’t been compromised by any sort of backdoor installed by someone with access to the physical machine running it.
Looks like AMD has already patched it, also appears to affect older Intel versions of the same tech concept but not current generations.
Only really affects guests in multi tenant hypervisor environments, requires physical access to the hypervisor, requires external physical hardware, requires booting the host with said hardware attached, at some point this level of compromise is already absurd. This kind of research is important and shows that we still need to limit out level of trust with host providers but I don't think anyone needs to panic.
I still think it's generally more good than bad and I appreciate they provide an authenticated ad free RSS feed for subscribers, but I think this was one of their worst headlines.
It's been a meme for a while I think. If I had to guess I'd say it started with some Tumblr thread. Obviously not entirely suitable for normal-speak, which is why it's on lemmy instead of a workplace slack channel.