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A group of academic researchers from Georgia Tech, Purdue University, and Synkhronix have developed a side-channel attack called TEE.Fail that allows for the extraction of secrets from the trusted execution environment (TEE) in a computer's main processor, including Intel's Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) and Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) and AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) and Ciphertext Hiding . The attack, at its core, involves the use of an interposition device built using off-the-shelf electronic equipment that costs under $1,000 and makes it possible to physically inspect all memory traffic inside a DDR5 server. "This allows us for the first time to extract cryptographic keys from Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP with Ciphertext Hiding, including in some cases secret attestation keys from fully updated machines in trusted status," the researchers noted on an informational site. "Beyond breaking CPU-based TEEs, we...

Social media platform X is urging users who have enrolled for two-factor authentication (2FA) using passkeys and hardware security keys like Yubikeys to re-enroll their key to ensure continued access to the service. To that end, users are being asked to complete the re-enrollment , either using their existing security key or enrolling a new one, by November 10, 2025. "After November 10, if you haven't re-enrolled a security key, your account will be locked until you: re-enroll; choose a different 2FA method; or elect not to use 2FA (but we always recommend you use 2FA to protect your account!)," the company's Safety handle wrote in a post on X. The move is part of the company's efforts to formally retire the twitter[.]com domain. Twitter, which was acquired by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk in October 2022, was rebranded to X in July 2023. In a follow-up post, X noted that the change does not apply to users who have enrolled for 2FA using other methods, such...

Chipmaker AMD has released fixes to address a security flaw dubbed RMPocalypse that could be exploited to undermine confidential computing guarantees provided by Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging ( SEV-SNP ). The attack , per ETH Zürich researchers Benedict Schlüter and Shweta Shinde, exploits AMD's incomplete protections that make it possible to perform a single memory write to the Reverse Map Paging (RMP) table, a data structure that's used to store security metadata for all DRAM pages in the system. "The Reverse Map Table (RMP) is a structure that resides in DRAM and maps system physical addresses (sPAs) to guest physical addresses (gPAs)," according to AMD's specification documentation . "There is only one RMP for the entire system, which is configured using x86 model-specific registers (MSRs)." "The RMP also contains various security attributes of each that are managed by the hypervisor through hardware-mediated and...

In yet another piece of research, academics from Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University have demonstrated that the security guarantees offered by Intel's Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) can be bypassed on DDR4 systems to passively decrypt sensitive data. SGX is designed as a hardware feature in Intel server processors that allows applications to be run in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). It essentially isolates trusted code and resources within what's called enclaves, preventing attackers from viewing their memory or CPU state.  In doing so, the mechanism ensures that the data stays confidential even when the underlying operating system has been tampered with or compromised by other means. However, the latest findings show the limitations of SGX. "We show how one can build a device to physically inspect all memory traffic inside a computer cheaply and easily, in environments with only basic electrical tools, and using equipment easily purchased on...

A group of academics from KU Leuven and the University of Birmingham has demonstrated a new vulnerability called Battering RAM to bypass the latest defenses on Intel and AMD cloud processors. "We built a simple, $50 interposer that sits quietly in the memory path, behaving transparently during startup and passing all trust checks," researchers Jesse De Meulemeester, David Oswald, Ingrid Verbauwhede, and Jo Van Bulck said on a website publicizing the findings. "Later, with just a flip of a switch, our interposer turns malicious and silently redirects protected addresses to attacker-controlled locations, allowing corruption or replay of encrypted memory." Battering RAM compromises Intel's Software Guard Extensions ( SGX ) and AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging ( SEV-SNP ) hardware security features, which ensure that customer data remains encrypted in memory and protected during use. It affects all systems using DDR4 memory...

A team of academics from ETH Zürich and Google has discovered a new variant of a RowHammer attack targeting Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) memory chips from South Korean semiconductor vendor SK Hynix. The RowHammer attack variant, codenamed Phoenix ( CVE-2025-6202 , CVSS score: 7.1), is capable of bypassing sophisticated protection mechanisms put in place to resist the attack. "We have proven that reliably triggering RowHammer bit flips on DDR5 devices from SK Hynix is possible on a larger scale," the Computer Security Group (COMSEC) at ETH Zürich said. "We also proved that on-die ECC does not stop RowHammer, and RowHammer end-to-end attacks are still possible with DDR5." RowHammer refers to a hardware vulnerability where repeated access of a row of memory in a DRAM chip can trigger bit flips in adjacent rows, resulting in data corruption. This can be subsequently weaponized by bad actors to gain unauthorized access to data, escalate privileges, or even cause a...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed vulnerabilities in select model webcams from Lenovo that could turn them into BadUSB attack devices. "This allows remote attackers to inject keystrokes covertly and launch attacks independent of the host operating system," Eclypsium researchers Paul Asadoorian, Mickey Shkatov, and Jesse Michael said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The vulnerabilities have been codenamed BadCam (aka CVE-2025-4371 ) by the firmware security company. The findings were presented at the DEF CON 33 security conference today. The development likely marks the first time it has been demonstrated that threat actors who gain control of a Linux-based USB peripheral that's already attached to a computer can weaponize it for malicious intent. In a hypothetical attack scenario, an adversary can take advantage of the vulnerability to send a victim a backdoored webcam, or attach it to a computer if they are able to secure physical access, and remot...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered multiple security flaws in Dell's ControlVault3 firmware and its associated Windows APIs that could have been abused by attackers to bypass Windows login, extract cryptographic keys, as well as maintain access even after a fresh operating system install by deploying undetectable malicious implants into the firmware. The vulnerabilities have been codenamed ReVault by Cisco Talos. More than 100 models of Dell laptops running Broadcom BCM5820X series chips are affected. There is no evidence that the vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild. Industries that require heightened security when logging in, via smart card readers or near-field communication (NFC) readers, are likely to use ControlVault devices in their settings. ControlVault is a hardware-based security solution that offers a secure way to store passwords, biometric templates, and security codes within the firmware. Attackers can chain the vulnerabilities, which were pres...

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) has released security updates to address a critical security flaw affecting Instant On Access Points that could allow an attacker to bypass authentication and gain administrative access to susceptible systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-37103, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. "Hard-coded login credentials were found in HPE Networking Instant On Access Points, allowing anyone with knowledge of it to bypass normal device authentication," the company said in an advisory. "Successful exploitation could allow a remote attacker to gain administrative access to the system." Also patched by HPE is an authenticated command injection flaw in the command-line interface of the HPE Networking Instant On Access Points (CVE-2025-37102, CVSS score: 7.2) that a remote attacker could exploit with elevated permissions to run arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system as a privileged user. This also me...

NVIDIA is urging customers to enable System-level Error Correction Codes (ECC) as a defense against a variant of a RowHammer attack demonstrated against its graphics processing units (GPUs). "Risk of successful exploitation from RowHammer attacks varies based on DRAM device, platform, design specification, and system settings," the GPU maker said in an advisory released this week. Dubbed GPUHammer , the attacks mark the first-ever RowHammer exploit demonstrated against NVIDIA's GPUs (e.g., NVIDIA A6000 GPU with GDDR6 Memory), causing malicious GPU users to tamper with other users' data by triggering bit flips in GPU memory. The most concerning consequence of this behavior, University of Toronto researchers found, is the degradation of an artificial intelligence (AI) model's accuracy from 80% to less than 1%. RowHammer is to modern DRAMs just like how Spectre and Meltdown are to contemporary CPUs. While both are hardware-level security vulnerabilities, Row...

Semiconductor company AMD is warning of a new set of vulnerabilities affecting a broad range of chipsets that could lead to information disclosure. The flaws, collectively called Transient Scheduler Attacks (TSA), manifest in the form of a speculative side channel in its CPUs that leverage execution timing of instructions under specific microarchitectural conditions. "In some cases, an attacker may be able to use this timing information to infer data from other contexts, resulting in information leakage," AMD said in an advisory. The company said issues were uncovered as part of a study published by Microsoft and ETH Zurich researchers about testing modern CPUs against speculative execution attacks like Meltdown and Foreshadow by stress testing isolation between security domains such as virtual machines, kernel, and processes. Following responsible disclosure in June 2024, the issues have been assigned the below CVE identifiers - CVE-2024-36350 (CVSS score: 5.6) ...

Researchers at ETH Zürich have discovered yet another security flaw that they say impacts all modern Intel CPUs and causes them to leak sensitive data from memory, showing that the vulnerability known as Spectre continues to haunt computer systems after more than seven years. The vulnerability, referred to as Branch Privilege Injection (BPI), "can be exploited to misuse the prediction calculations of the CPU (central processing unit) in order to gain unauthorized access to information from other processor users," ETH Zurich said . Kaveh Razavi, head of the Computer Security Group (COMSEC) and one of the authors of the study, said the shortcoming affects all Intel processors, potentially enabling bad actors to read the contents of the processor's cache and the working memory of another user of the same CPU. The attack leverages what's called Branch Predictor Race Conditions ( BPRC ) that emerge when a processor switches between prediction calculations for two use...

A security vulnerability has been disclosed in AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) that could permit an attacker to load a malicious CPU microcode under specific conditions. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-56161 , carries a CVSS score of 7.2 out of 10.0, indicating high severity. "Improper signature verification in AMD CPU ROM microcode patch loader may allow an attacker with local administrator privilege to load malicious CPU microcode resulting in loss of confidentiality and integrity of a confidential guest running under AMD SEV-SNP," AMD said in an advisory. The chipmaker credited Google security researchers Josh Eads, Kristoffer Janke, Eduardo Vela, Tavis Ormandy, and Matteo Rizzo for discovering and reporting the flaw on September 25, 2024. SEV is a security feature that uses a unique key per virtual machine to isolate virtual machines (VMs) and the hypervisor from one another. SNP, which stands for Secure Nested Paging, incorporates memory integrity p...

A team of security researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and Ruhr University Bochum has demonstrated two new side-channel attacks targeting Apple silicon that could be exploited to leak sensitive information from web browsers like Safari and Google Chrome. The attacks have been codenamed Data Speculation Attacks via Load Address Prediction on Apple Silicon ( SLAP ) and Breaking the Apple M3 CPU via False Load Output Predictions ( FLOP ). Apple was notified of the issues in May and September 2024, respectively. The vulnerabilities, like the previously disclosed iLeakage attack, build on Spectre , arising when speculative execution "backfires," leaving traces of mispredictions in the CPU's microarchitectural state and the cache. Speculative execution refers to a performance optimization mechanism in modern processors that are aimed at predicting the control flow the CPU should take and execute instructions along the branch beforehand. In the event of a mi...

More than six years after the Spectre security flaw impacting modern CPU processors came to light, new research has found that the latest AMD and Intel processors are still susceptible to speculative execution attacks. The attack, disclosed by ETH Zürich researchers Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi, aims to undermine the Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier ( IBPB ) on x86 chips, a crucial mitigation against speculative execution attacks. Speculative execution refers to a performance optimization feature wherein modern CPUs execute certain instructions out-of-order by predicting the branch a program will take beforehand, thus speeding up the task if the speculatively used value was correct. If it results in a misprediction, the instructions, called transient, are declared invalid and squashed, before the processor can resume execution with the correct value. While the execution results of transient instructions are not committed to the architectural program state, it's still ...

Google has announced that it will be switching from KYBER to ML-KEM in its Chrome web browser as part of its ongoing efforts to defend against the risk posed by cryptographically relevant quantum computers ( CRQCs ). "Chrome will offer a key share prediction for hybrid ML-KEM (codepoint 0x11EC)," David Adrian, David Benjamin, Bob Beck, and Devon O'Brien of the Chrome Team said . "The PostQuantumKeyAgreementEnabled flag and enterprise policy will apply to both Kyber and ML-KEM." The changes are expected to take effect in Chrome version 131, which is on track for release in early November 2024. Google noted that the two hybrid post-quantum key exchange approaches are essentially incompatible with each other, prompting it to abandon KYBER. "The changes to the final version of ML-KEM make it incompatible with the previously deployed version of Kyber," the company said. "As a result, the codepoint in TLS for hybrid post-quantum key exchange is ch...

A novel side-channel attack has been found to leverage radio signals emanated by a device's random access memory (RAM) as a data exfiltration mechanism, posing a threat to air-gapped networks. The technique has been codenamed RAMBO (short for "Radiation of Air-gapped Memory Bus for Offense") by Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of the Offensive Cyber Research Lab in the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. "Using software-generated radio signals, malware can encode sensitive information such as files, images, keylogging, biometric information, and encryption keys," Dr. Guri said in a newly published research paper. "With software-defined radio (SDR) hardware, and a simple off-the-shelf antenna, an attacker can intercept transmitted raw radio signals from a distance. The signals can then be decoded and translated back into binary information." Over the years, Dr. Guri has conco...