{"id":50052,"date":"2023-01-10T18:01:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-10T18:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.csoonline.com\/article\/3685070\/intel-boosts-vm-security-guards-against-stack-attacks-in-new-xeon-release.html#tk.rss_security"},"modified":"2023-01-10T18:01:00","modified_gmt":"2023-01-10T18:01:00","slug":"intel-boosts-vm-security-guards-against-stack-attacks-in-new-xeon-release","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.threatshub.org\/blog\/intel-boosts-vm-security-guards-against-stack-attacks-in-new-xeon-release\/","title":{"rendered":"Intel boosts VM security, guards against stack attacks in new Xeon release"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Intel today announced the rollout of the fourth generation of its Xeon family of server chipsets, detailing several new features under the company\u2019s confidential computing<\/a> umbrella of security features. Improvements to Intel\u2019s trusted execution environment<\/a> and a new technique for combatting jump- and return-oriented programming attacks were the most notable upgrades.<\/p>\n

Xeon\u2019s fourth generation introduces a number of new features across the board, including marked improvements to energy efficiency, AI<\/a> processing, and edge workload<\/a> handling, but the security side\u2019s highlights are virtual machine<\/a> (VM) isolation technology and control flow enforcement. The former technique provides hardware-level VM isolation, without the need for hypervisor<\/a> oversight \u2014 instead of a single app living inside of a trusted environment, a whole VM can live there.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of options for trusted execution environments in other areas of the stack, but Intel fellow Amy Santoni, the company\u2019s chief Xeon security architect, said that not all of them offer the same capabilities or meet the same standards.<\/p>\n

Intel aims to secure virtual environments<\/h2>\n

\u201cIt depends on your goals for a trusted environment,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you look at the cloud today, you can have multiple tenants running on the same hardware with virtualization technology, but in just a regular cloud environment, the hypervisor still has access to all those VM\u2019s data if you allow them to \u2014there\u2019s nothing at a hardware level to prevent a VM from accessing data.\u201d<\/p>\n

That isolation is provided via Intel\u2019s Trust Domain Extensions framework, which already works with Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba and IBM \u2014 no timeline was provided for AWS integration at the time of this writing.<\/p>\n

Control flow enforcement is a feature that Intel has already implemented in its endpoint-focused Core line of processors, but is new to the Xeon family, aimed at stamping out a family of cyberattack techniques called return-oriented and jump-oriented programming. The idea with such attacks is to rearrange the order in which pieces of code are provided back to the application, for malicious purposes.<\/p>\n