Wednesday, March 7, 2018

2018 is a bad year for Intel - SGX can help attackers hide and execute malware without requiring any root privileges, or operating system modifications



Schwarz says his malware does not exploit any vulnerability in SGX. Rather it takes advantage of the fact that Intel considers software-based side-channel attacks on SGX as not possible and therefore out of scope. Side channel attacks gather and use information about some aspect of a system's physical operation to attack and expose sensitive data.

SGX is a security mechanism that Intel introduced with its Skylake processor architecture. It is designed to protect code and data from leaks and disclosure. As Schwarz notes in a technical paper, SGX uses secure enclaves working in hardware-isolated memory areas to protect application secrets from hardware attacks. Such enclaves can be used to securely store hardware-encrypted passwords, password managers, cryptographic keys, bitcoin wallets, and other secrets.

The exploit against SGX itself is harder to mount than a regular zero-day exploit, Schwarz concedes. But for someone with a background in micro-architectural attacks, it is perfectly doable

https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/intel-sgx-can-be-used-to-hide-execute-malware/d/d-id/1331211?

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