Fault Attacks on Encrypted General Purpose Compute Platforms

Adversaries with physical access to a target platform can perform cold boot or DMA attacks to extract sensitive data from the RAM. To prevent such attacks, hardware vendors announced respective processor extensions. AMD's extension SME will provide means to encrypt the RAM to protect security-relevant assets that reside there. The encryption will protect the user's content against passive eavesdropping. However, the level of protection it provides in scenarios that involve an adversary who cannot only read from RAM but also change content in RAM is less clear. This paper addresses the open research question whether encryption alone is a dependable protection mechanism in practice when considering an active adversary. To this end, we first build a software based memory encryption solution on a desktop system which mimics AMD's SME. Subsequently, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept fault attack on this system, by which we are able to extract the private RSA key of a GnuPG user. Our work suggests that transparent memory encryption is not enough to prevent active attacks.