Ethical Hacking News
The $50 Battering RAM Attack: A Critical Vulnerability That Exposes Intel and AMD Cloud Security Protections
Battering RAM compromises Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) and AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) hardware security features, allowing an attacker to bypass protections on cloud processors.
Battering RAM is a new vulnerability that compromises Intel and AMD cloud processors, allowing unauthorized access to protected memory regions.The attack uses a custom-built DDR4 interposer hardware hack to redirect physical addresses and gain access to sensitive data.Battering RAM can bypass Intel's SGX and AMD's SEV-SNP hardware security features, putting customer data at risk.The vulnerability requires only a $50 interposer device to exploit.The attack allows arbitrary read access to victim plaintext on Intel platforms and sidesteps recent firmware mitigations against BadRAM on AMD systems.The discovery of Battering RAM highlights the ongoing battle between cybersecurity researchers and malicious actors to stay one step ahead.Other recently identified vulnerabilities include L1TF Reloaded and VMScape, which demonstrate the growing sophistication of cyber threats.
The cybersecurity landscape has been abuzz with recent revelations about a new vulnerability known as Battering RAM, which has been demonstrated to compromise the latest defenses on Intel and AMD cloud processors. This attack, which exploits a custom-built DDR4 interposer hardware hack, stealthily redirects physical addresses and gains unauthorized access to protected memory regions.
The researchers behind this discovery, Jesse De Meulemeester, David Oswald, Ingrid Verbauwhede, and Jo Van Bulck, from KU Leuven and the University of Birmingham respectively, have been praised for their meticulous work in identifying the vulnerability. Their research has revealed that Battering RAM can be used to bypass Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) and AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) hardware security features.
These security features were designed to ensure that customer data remains encrypted in memory and protected during use, particularly for confidential computing workloads running in public cloud environments. However, the Battering RAM attack has shown that these protections can be breached through a simple $50 interposer device. The device is inserted into the memory path, behaving transparently during startup and passing all trust checks.
Later, with just a flip of a switch, the interposer turns malicious and silently redirects protected addresses to attacker-controlled locations, allowing corruption or replay of encrypted memory. This attack can lead to significant security breaches, particularly in public cloud environments where sensitive data is stored and processed.
The researchers also noted that Battering RAM achieves arbitrary read access to victim plaintext on Intel platforms, while on AMD systems, it allows the attack to sidestep recent firmware mitigations against BadRAM. This means that even with the latest security patches, an attacker can still introduce arbitrary backdoors into protected workloads without raising any suspicion.
The discovery of Battering RAM follows a series of other vulnerabilities that have been identified in recent months, including L1TF Reloaded and VMScape. These attacks highlight the ongoing battle between cybersecurity researchers and malicious actors to stay one step ahead of each other.
VMScape, for instance, was demonstrated by academics from ETH Zurich, who showed how it can be used to break virtualization boundaries on AMD Zen CPUs and Intel Coffee Lake processors. This attack exploits isolation gaps across host and guest in user and supervisor modes to leak arbitrary memory from an unmodified QEMU process.
The L1TF Reloaded vulnerability, which was also recently disclosed, allows for information leakage through the abuse of a CPU optimization known as the stack engine. A proof-of-concept (PoC) has been developed for AMD Zen 5 machines, although it is believed that all models have this "abusable hardware feature."
In another development, researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam reported on a new attack technique referred to as L1TF Reloaded, which combines L1 Terminal Fault and Half-Spectre gadgets to leak memory from virtual machines running on public cloud services.
The discovery of Battering RAM comes at a time when cybersecurity experts are sounding the alarm about the increasing sophistication of cyber threats. As more and more organizations shift their operations to the cloud, it is becoming essential for them to ensure that their security defenses are robust enough to protect against such attacks.
In response to this growing concern, companies like Google and Amazon have been working tirelessly to patch vulnerabilities in their systems and provide timely updates to their customers. For instance, Google has awarded a $151,515 bug bounty to researchers who discovered the L1TF Reloaded vulnerability, while Amazon has assured its customers that the AWS Nitro System is not impacted by this attack.
However, despite these efforts, the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve at an unprecedented rate, making it increasingly challenging for organizations to keep pace with the latest threats. As such, it is essential for all organizations to prioritize their cybersecurity defenses and stay vigilant about potential vulnerabilities in their systems.
In conclusion, the Battering RAM attack highlights the critical need for robust security defenses in cloud computing environments. As more and more organizations shift their operations to the cloud, it is essential for them to ensure that their security defenses are up-to-date and effective against emerging threats like this one. Only through concerted efforts can we hope to protect our sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands.
Related Information:
https://www.ethicalhackingnews.com/articles/The-50-Battering-RAM-Attack-A-Critical-Vulnerability-That-Exposes-Intel-and-AMD-Cloud-Security-Protections-ehn.shtml
https://thehackernews.com/2025/10/50-battering-ram-attack-breaks-intel.html
https://www.heise.de/en/news/BadRAM-Historical-side-channel-undermines-confidential-computing-in-the-cloud-10194591.html
Published: Tue Sep 30 14:53:47 2025 by llama3.2 3B Q4_K_M
