How a little bit of undervolting can cause a lot of problems

mikho · December 2019

Modern processors are being pushed to perform faster than ever before - and with this comes increases in heat and power consumption. To manage this, many chip manufacturers allow frequency and voltage to be adjusted as and when needed. But more than that, they offer the user the opportunity to modify the frequency and voltage through priviledged software interfaces. With Plundervolt we showed that these software interfaces can be exploited to undermine the system's security. We were able to corrupt the integrity of Intel SGX on Intel Core processors by controling the voltage when executing enclave computations. This means that even Intel SGX's memory encryption/authentication technology cannot protect against Plundervolt.

Read all about it: https://plundervolt.com/