SILM Seminar

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Episode 2 -

  • Robert Buhren (TU Berlin): Taking apart AMD's root-of-trust: Reverse engineering the AMD Secure Processor - -
  • Modern AMD CPUs contain a dedicated security co-processor, the AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP). The AMD-SP, formerly known as Platform Security Processor (PSP), constitutes the root-of-trust of the whole AMD SOC and is part of the AMD die. It is responsible for hosting firmware components related to security features such as AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization technology or firmware TPMs found in AMD desktop systems, as well as for initializing the AMD SOC. In this talk, I present an overview of our reverse-engineering efforts of the AMD-SP. I introduce the tools we developed to tinker with the SP's firmware components, including our emulator for the SP that allows you to analyze the SP's runtime behavior on your laptop! Furthermore, I present firmware and bootrom issues that allow an attacker to take full control over the AMD-SP.

    Relevant links:

    Video

  • Leila Delshadtehrani (Boston University): Improving security through a programmable hardware monitor - -
  • In recent years, security breaches of computing systems have become very common; hence, security has become a first-class design requirement. Recently, there has been a growing trend in the industry for hardware-assisted security features. The current trend implements dedicated hardware security extensions through an imperfect, lengthy, and costly process. These dedicated hardware extensions built in silicon cannot get updated at the same pace as security threats evolve. In contrast, a flexible hardware monitor can efficiently enforce and enhance a variety of security policies as security threats evolve. In this talk, I will present our work on a minimally invasive and efficient implementation of a Programmable Hardware Monitor (PHMon) with the full software stack around it. PHMon can enforce a variety of security policies and can also assist with detecting software bugs and security vulnerabilities. To demonstrate PHMon’s versatility and its ease of adoption, I will discuss some of PHMon’s use cases.

    Relevant links:

    Video