  Adversaries with physical access to a target platform can perform cold boot
or DMA attacks to extract sensitive data from the RAM. In response, several
main-memory encryption schemes have been proposed to prevent such attacks. Also
hardware vendors have acknowledged the threat and already announced respective
hardware extensions. Intel's SGX and AMD's SME will provide means to encrypt
parts of the RAM to protect security-relevant assets that reside there.
Encrypting the RAM will protect the user's content against passive
eavesdropping. However, the level of protection it provides in scenarios that
involve an adversary who is not only able to read from RAM but can also change
content in RAM is less clear. Obviously, encryption offers some protection
against such an "active" adversary: from the ciphertext the adversary cannot
see what value is changed in the plaintext, nor predict the system behaviour
based on the changes. But is this enough to prevent an active adversary from
performing malicious tasks? 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.

Cryptography and Security