TLB Poisoning Attacks on AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization

Abstract

AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) is an emerging technology of AMD server processors, which provides transparent memory encryption and key management for virtual machines (VM) without trusting the underlying hypervisor. Like Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX), SEV forms a foundation for confidential computing on untrusted machines; unlike SGX, SEV supports full VM encryption and thus makes porting applications straightforward. To date, many mainstream cloud service providers, including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, have already adopted (or are planning to adopt) SEV for confidential cloud services.