New DDRop Attack Breaks Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP Confidential Computing

Researchers have disclosed a hardware-based attack called DDRop that exploits a design flaw in Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP confidential computing technologies. The attack uses a low-cost interposer device inserted between the processor and memory module to silently drop memory writes, allowing an attacker to manipulate encrypted memory by forcing the reuse of stale data. This enables privilege escalation, memory read/write access to victim virtual machines, and tampering with attestation mechanisms. The vulnerability stems from the lack of a freshness check in memory encryption designs, and no software patch can fully mitigate it due to its hardware-level nature.

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