New DDRop Attack Breaks Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP Confidential Computing
Researchers have disclosed a new hardware attack, called DDRop , that breaks the memory protection in Intel and AMD confidential computing by silently dropping writes to a server's memory, so the processor keeps reading old encrypted data as if it were current. The attack requires an attacker who already controls the server's software and can briefly access the machine to insert a small circuit board, called an interposer , between the processor and a memory module. The interposer costs under $200 to build. DDRop works against Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP, the hardware that cloud services use to keep customer data private while it is in use, even from the cloud provider. Confidential computing keeps a server's memory encrypted, so that even someone with physical access to the machine sees only scrambled data. To cover the large amount of memory that a cloud server uses, though, these designs omit a guarantee called freshness. The processor can confi...
Sep 14, 2026