A $50 'Battering RAM' Can Bust Confidential Computing

Researchers have demonstrated an attack dubbed Battering RAM that can bypass confidential computing protections on Intel SGX and AMD SEV-SNP, effectively breaking encryption designed to protect data in memory. The team, from KU Leuven and the University of Birmingham/Durham University, built a low-cost interposer for less than $50 that sits in the memory path and can dynamically rewrite address metadata to capture and replay encrypted memory.

The attack requires one-time physical access to the hardware, meaning an insider or someone with supply-chain access could potentially mount it. Commercial DRAM interposers typically cost more than $100,000, while the researchers’ open-source PCB and schematics are available via a GitHub repository.

Intel and AMD have acknowledged the exploit; both said physical attacks on DRAM are out of scope for their current products and offered advisories rather than mitigations, with the researchers stressing that encrypted memory is not inherently secure against physical tampering.

The findings, reported on 1 October 2025, suggest defenders should reassess threat models for physical attacks on confidential computing[.]According to the research team’s website, Modern computers rely on DRAM to store data in use, and the interposer enables attackers to redirect protected addresses to attacker-controlled memory, leading to decryption in the attacker’s location.