$50 Battering RAM Attack Breaks Intel and AMD Cloud Security Protections

A group of academics from KU Leuven and the University of Birmingham has demonstrated a vulnerability called Battering RAM to bypass the latest protections on Intel and AMD cloud processors. They built a simple, $50 interposer that sits quietly in the memory path and passes trust checks during startup, then can be flipped to redirect protected addresses to attacker-controlled locations, allowing corruption or replay of encrypted memory.

Battering RAM compromises Intel’s Software Guard Extensions and AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging, enabling access to memory that should remain protected in use. The attack affects all systems using DDR4 memory and targets confidential computing workloads running in public cloud environments.

On Intel platforms, it achieves arbitrary read and write access to victim enclaves, while on AMD systems it can sidestep firmware mitigations against BadRAM and insert backdoors into virtual machines without raising suspicion. The vulnerability was reported to vendors earlier this year, and responses indicate that physical attacks are considered out of scope, with a broader redesign of memory encryption needed for full defence.