The latest security information on Intel® products.
TEE.fail
Announcement ID:
2025-10-28-001
Issue:
Previously, two sets of independent researchers published methods to attack Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) with a physical interposer device. These methods, referred to as Wiretap and Battering RAM, were specific to 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® platforms with DDR4-based memory.
Further to this announcement researchers from Georgia Tech and Purdue University have extended their work, Wiretap, on applying a passive interposer to read ciphertext memory of low entropy data to create a ciphertext-to-plain-text dictionary to platforms supporting DDR5 (specifically, 4th/5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and Intel® Xeon® 6 Processors).
This most recent research, released in a paper titled “TEE.fail: Breaking Trusted Execution Environments via DDR5 Memory Bus Interposition”, does not change Intel’s previous out of scope statement for these types of physical attacks.
Additional Information:
More Information on Encrypted Memory Frameworks for Intel Confidential Computing.
Acknowledgements:
Intel would like to thank Jalen Chuang (Georgia Tech), Alex Seto (Purdue University), Nicolas Berrios (Georgia Tech), Stephan van Schaik (van Schaik, LLC), Christina Garman (Purdue University), and Daniel Genkin (Georgia Tech) for reporting this issue.
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