New DDRop Attack Breaks Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP Confidential Computing

Confidential computing assumes the memory bus is honest. DDRop breaks that with a $159 DDR5 interposer that silently drops writes, so the CPU keeps reading stale encrypted data as fresh. Researchers at KU Leuven, ETH Zurich, Durham and Google used it to read Intel TDX guest memory and forge attestations. Intel and AMD call physical attacks out of scope and won’t assign CVEs - consistent with their threat model, awkward if you rent the hardware.