Stefan Mileschin

Promises Full Memory Encryption in upcoming CPUs

Chipzilla says it is planning to bring full memory encryption to future CPUs, something which indicates that it has decided to play catch-up with AMD.

Talking to the assembled throngs at Intel’s Security Day event Anil Rao and Scott Woodgate opened their presentation with a present-and-future discussion of Intel's SGX (Software Guard Extensions) and ended up spilling the beans on full memory encryption.

Intel SGX—announced in 2014 and launched with the Skylake microarchitecture in 2015—was one of the first hardware encryption technologies designed to protect areas of memory from unauthorised users, up to and including the system administrators themselves. SGX is a set of x86_64 CPU instructions which allows a process to create an "enclave" within memory which is hardware encrypted. Data stored in the encrypted enclave is only decrypted within the CPU—and even then, it is only decrypted at the request of instructions executed from within the enclave itself.

The idea is that someone with root (system administrator) access to the running system can't usefully read or alter SGX-protected enclaves.

But Intel's SGX is proprietary and vendor-specific and applications can only run on Intel processors. You must design your application around SGX and it can’t be switched on and off.

https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardwar...ch-up-with-amd