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APIC/EPIC Intel chips leak secrets even the kernel shouldn’t see (sophos.com)
2 points by develatio on Aug 11, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


I wish we'd stop counting things of the form "an administrator can now access things on the system that DRM tried to restrict" as vulnerabilities.


I don't think SGX can be considered DRM. Furthermore, the kernel being able to access (as in "read the data") something that was precisely designed not to be accessed by anything, kernel included, (because its intended usage is cryptography) most certainly is a big vulnerability.


Isn't the entire point of SGX to keep the owner of a device from being able to access certain data on it? How is that anything other than DRM? And I know it allows access that was intended to be blocked, but my point was blocking anything on a system from the owner/administrator of it shouldn't ever be done anyway.


No, the point of SGX is to be able to encapsulate a piece of code+data inside a "black box". That black box can the receive input, run the code on that input (for example: decrypt the input using a private key) and return output data. The whole point of SGX is to be able to create an enclave where some data (for example, a private key) can be placed in a secure manner, which is a very reasonable thing to do when dealing with sensitive data.




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