Google has analyzed 81 potential attack vectors and confirmed 10 vulnerabilities in Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) after a nine-month audit process.
TDX is a type of ‘confidential computing’ technology built to provide security for sensitive data while processing it in a hardware-isolated environment. According to Intel, TDX offers several new features, including full VM (virtual machine) compute models, without requiring any code changes.
Read more on confidential computing: 3 Questions Answered About Confidential Computing
“Organizations use confidential computing to control their data and provide access to trusted parties in a manner that is verifiable, revocable and time-sensitive,” said Anil Rao, vice president and general manager of systems architecture and engineering in the office of the CTO at Intel. “Our early effort with Google solidifies our commitment to perform a thorough analysis to address all potential vulnerabilities.”
In a blog post published earlier today, Google staff software engineer Cfir Cohen and principal engineer platform security Andrés Lagar-Cavilla said they inspected the TDX firmware for several issues, including those related to arbitrary code execution (RCE), safe error handling and state management, and denial of service (DoS). Intel reportedly remediated all of the issues identified by Google.
“We are now happy to report all issues that we reported have been remediated by Intel,” Cohen and Lagar-Cavilla wrote. “A secondary goal was to have a better understanding of the expected threat model for Intel TDX and identify limitations in the design and implementation that would better inform Google’s deployment decisions.”
To this end, Google and Intel conducted the review via shared issue trackers and regular technical meetings.
“This allowed Intel to provide deep technical information about the function of the Intel TDX components as well as enabling the reviewers to resolve potential ambiguities in documentation and source code,” the Google post reads.
The search giant also confirmed it is supporting Intel in making the TDX firmware source code base publicly accessible and verifiably buildable.
The Intel collaboration comes weeks after Google’s Project Zero reported 18 zero-day flaws in Exynos Modems made by Samsung.
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