Intel SGX Enclaves | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A team of cybersecurity researchers demonstrated a novel yet another technique to hijack Intel SGX, a hardware-isolated trusted space on modern Intel CPUs that encrypts extremely sensitive data to shield it from attackers even when a system gets compromised. Dubbed Plundervolt and tracked as CVE-2019-11157, the attack relies on the fact that modern processors allow frequency and voltage to be adjusted when needed, which, according to researchers, can be modified in a controlled way to induce errors in the memory by flipping bits. Bit flip is a phenomenon widely known for the Rowhammer attack wherein attackers hijack vulnerable memory cells by changing their value from 1 to a 0, or vice versa—all by tweaking the electrical charge of neighboring memory cells. However, since the Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclave memory is encrypted, the Plundervolt attack leverages the same idea of flipping bits by injecting faults in the CPU before they are written to the memory. Plundervo...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a way to hide malicious code in Intel SGX enclaves, a hardware-based memory encryption feature in modern processors that isolates sensitive code and data to protect it from disclosure or modification. In other words, the technique allows attackers to implant malware code in a secure memory that uses protection features of SGX which are otherwise designed to protect important data from prying eyes or from being tampered, even on a compromised system. Introduced with Intel's Skylake processors, SGX (Software Guard Extensions) allows developers to run selected application modules in a completely isolated secure region of memory, called enclaves, which are designed to be protected from processes running at higher privilege levels like the operating system, kernel, BIOS, SMM, hypervisor, etc. However, a team of researchers, some of whom were behind the discovery of the Spectre-Meltdown CPU flaws , managed to bypass this protection and g...

Most microsegmentation projects fail before they even get off the ground—too complex, too slow, too disruptive. But Andelyn Biosciences proved it doesn't have to be that way.  Microsegmentation: The Missing Piece in Zero Trust Security   Security teams today are under constant pressure to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Perimeter-based defenses alone can no longer provide sufficient protection as attackers shift their focus to lateral movement within enterprise networks. With over 70% of successful breaches involving attackers moving laterally, organizations are rethinking how they secure internal traffic.  Microsegmentation has emerged as a key strategy in achieving Zero Trust security by restricting access to critical assets based on identity rather than network location. However, traditional microsegmentation approaches—often involving VLAN reconfigurations, agent deployments, or complex firewall rules—tend to be slow, operationally disrupt...