Few days before the December 13 public tryout of the newest and the most powerful AMD Zen chipset, researchers from the Technical University of Berlin questioned the reliability of the security features of the upcoming AMD Zen. This after they discovered flaws in the Secure Encrypted Virtualization of AMD, a feature that prevent malicious hypervisor from accessing sensitive and important data.
But AMD allays fear of security flaws brought about by SEV in the highly anticipated Summit Ridge processor, or on any of its products in the market. In a response to the email of Gameguide, AMD spokesperson Gary Silcott said it is important to understand that SEV is not on any AMD products currently in market, so the proposed vulnerability does not impact any current AMD products.
"AMD is pleased to hear researchers see the merit and promise of AMD SEV technology, as it is the first to address protection of data in a virtualized environment and represents a significant step forward in security. AMD along with the rest of the industry, continues to evaluate new threats and develop responses to them," said Silcott.
"AMD SEV is just one of the critical ingredients in AMD's security toolbox and the industry can expect to see more security enhancements in the future with our upcoming Naples platform," he added.
The statement came after Gamenguide sought the company's reaction in an open access paper published at Cornell University Library with authors Felicitas Hetzelt and Robert Buhren saying that the AMD SEV technology is not up to the task on preventing the threat of malicious hypervisors, a virtual machine control panels that have access to guest virtual machines.
They attributed the weakness to the design flaws of SEV. The cloud security experts based their findings on the AMD Memory Encryption paper published by the AMD itself. The actual machine cannot the tested physically as it is yet to be released in 2017.
The study highlighted three security faults on the design of SEV. First on the non-encryption of the virtual machine control block, which allow hypervisors to bypass the virtual machine's memory encryption. Second, it also noted that the general purpose register are not encrypted upon VM exit so that it could potentially leak important data. Third is on the control of the nested pagetables, which allows a malicious hypervisor to closely control the execution of a virtual machine and breach it with memory replay attacks.
On December 13, 3pm CST, AMD is set to unleash the power of AMD Zen ahead of its slated release early in 2017. It invited the public and some renown gaming legends to test the next generation AMD chipset. Packed with amazing features and superb power under its hood, AMD Zen CPU aims to match or even outclass Intel's Core i7 6900K.
Wath the preview of the breakthrough performance of next generation AMD Zen here: