DDRop attack drops DDR5 writes to break Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP confidential VMs
matthew_d_green · x · 2026-09-17
Researchers have disclosed DDRop, a low-cost hardware memory interposer attack coordinated with Intel and AMD that makes writes to server memory silently disappear, causing confidential VMs to read stale data as if freshly written.
- The gap: Memory encryption in Intel TDX, Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP provides confidentiality but not freshness — the CPU can verify data is encrypted but not that it is current, so dropped writes leave perfectly decryptable stale contents.
- Impact: The attack can tamper with protected VMs on both Intel and AMD platforms, and on Intel TDX can even forge the attestation evidence used to prove a VM is trusted.
- The paper appears at ACM CCS 2026.
Another reminder that hardware-level trust assumptions underpinning confidential computing in shared clouds can fail.
Related event: DDRop attack silently drops DDR5 writes to break confidential VMs(2 posts)→
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