Security News > 2020 > June > Another month, another way to smash Intel's SGX security. Let's take a closer look at these latest holes...

Intel's Software Guard Extensions, known as SGX among friends, consist of a set of instructions for running a secure enclave inside an encrypted memory partition using certain Intel microprocessors.

Sadly for Intel and those who depend on its technology, security researchers keep finding flaws in SGX. On Tuesday, two separate sets of boffins published papers describing SGX vulnerabilities, but they're not really quite as bad as is claimed.

Intel Xeon Scalable, Intel Atom processors, and Intel 10th Gen Core processors, at least, are not affected.

It's a transient execution attack utilizing CacheOut to obtain SGX attestation keys from a fully patched Intel machine.

"Hyper-threading makes this attack significantly easier, but for CPUs like the Intel Core i9-9900K and the Intel Core i7-8665U to pass Intel SGX remote attestation, it is not required that hyper-threading has to be turned off," explained van Schaik, one of the paper's co-authors, via Twitter.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/06/10/intel_patches_sgx_again/