This post was originally published on Data Center Knowledge
The last decade-plus has seen a wealth of advancements designed to secure data at the microprocessor level, but a team of academic researchers recently punched through those defenses with a tiny hardware module that cost less than $50 to build.
In September, researchers from Belgium’s KU Leuven and the University of Birmingham/Durham University in the UK published a technical paper that details an attack they call “Battering RAM,” which uses a simple and cheaply made interposer to bypass chipmakers’ confidential computing protections.
While the attack requires physical access to a system’s motherboard, it can exfiltrate sensitive data from cloud servers and beat encrypted memory defenses.
The team will present its research in a Black Hat Europe 2025 session next month and discuss how the attack vector puts cloud providers and their customers’ data at risk.
In an interview with Dark Reading, two members of the research team explain how encrypted memory protections aren’t as strong as they used to be – and why performance tradeoffs are to blame.
Continue reading this article in Dark Reading, a Data Center Knowledge partner site
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