Exploiting Interfaces of Secure Encrypted Virtual Machines

TL;DR

This paper uncovers new attack methods exploiting interfaces of secure encrypted virtual machines, demonstrating vulnerabilities that allow data extraction, code injection, and arbitrary code execution, even under strong hardware-based protections.

Contribution

It introduces novel attack techniques targeting SEV and SEV-ES virtual machines by manipulating external interfaces, revealing significant security risks in these protected environments.

Findings

Virtual devices can be exploited to extract encryption keys.

Manipulating CPUID and RDTSC reduces kernel defense entropy.

Secret data exfiltration and code injection are feasible via MMIO forgery.

Abstract

Cloud computing is a convenient model for processing data remotely. However, users must trust their cloud provider with the confidentiality and integrity of the stored and processed data. To increase the protection of virtual machines, AMD introduced SEV, a hardware feature which aims to protect code and data in a virtual machine. This allows to store and process sensitive data in cloud environments without the need to trust the cloud provider or the underlying software. However, the virtual machine still depends on the hypervisor for performing certain activities, such as the emulation of special CPU instructions, or the emulation of devices. Yet, most code that runs in virtual machines was not written with an attacker model which considers the hypervisor as malicious. In this work, we introduce a new class of attacks in which a malicious hypervisor manipulates external interfaces of an SEV or SEV-ES virtual machine to make it act against its own interests. We start by showing how we can make use of virtual devices to extract encryption keys and secret data of a virtual machine. We then show how we can reduce the entropy of probabilistic kernel defenses in the virtual machine by carefully manipulating the results of the CPUID and RDTSC instructions. We continue by showing an approach for secret data exfiltration and code injection based on the forgery of MMIO regions over the VM's address space. Finally, we show another attack which forces decryption of the VM's stack and uses Return Oriented Programming to execute arbitrary code inside the VM. While our approach is also applicable to traditional virtualization environments, its severity significantly increases with the attacker model of SEV-ES, which aims to protect a virtual machine from a benign but vulnerable hypervisor.