AMD SEV VM Power Side Channel Security Bulletin
Bulletin ID: AMD-SB-3004
Potential Impact: Information disclosure
Severity: Low
Summary
Researchers have reported a potential power side-channel attack using the Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) interface on AMD SEV VMs.
The researchers focused only on the first generation of AMD SEV technology and state they did not experiment on SEV-ES or SEV-SNP (subsequent SEV generations) due to their own equipment limitations and security enhancements in subsequent SEV generations, such as encrypted VMSA which is designed to provide some security measures against the type of attacks reported in their paper.
In our analysis, the reported attack does not seem to be a particularly novel attack as it uses the same technique as the Platypus attack from 2020. One difference from the Platypus attack is this reported attack is used against an AMD SEV virtual machine. As measured by our CVSS scoring, this is a low severity issue.
Affected Products
Data Center
- 1st Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors
- 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors
- 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors
- 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors
CVE Details
Refer to Glossary for explanation of terms
CVE |
Severity |
CVE Description |
| CVE-2023-20575 | Low |
A potential power side-channel vulnerability in some AMD processors may allow an authenticated attacker to use the power reporting functionality to monitor a program’s execution inside an AMD SEV VM potentially resulting in a leak of sensitive information. |
Mitigation
AMD recommends software developers employ existing best practices including constant-time algorithms, power side-channel resistant algorithms and avoid secret-dependent control flows where appropriate to help mitigate this potential vulnerability.
Acknowledgement
AMD thanks Wubing Wang, Mengyuan Li, Zhiqiang Lin from The Ohio State University and Yinqian Zhang from Southern University of Science and Technology for reporting this issue and engaging in coordinated vulnerability disclosure.
Revisions
| Revision Date | Description |
| 2023-07-11 | Initial publication |
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