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New DDRop Attack Breaks Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP With $159 DDR5 Device

DDRop uses a $159 DDR5 RDIMM interposer to silently drop memory writes and break Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP confidential VMs.

Researchers published DDRop, a physical attack built from about $159 in parts that uses a custom DDR5 RDIMM interposer to inject parity errors and silently discard selected cache-line writebacks. Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP are affected because they lack per-line cryptographic freshness, so processors can accept stale encrypted data as valid state. The team demonstrated deterministic plaintext copying between pages, malicious Secure EPT entry injection, forcing trust domains into debug mode, and forging attestation measurements. The attack requires privileged host control plus brief physical access, and researchers say no simple software patch exists.

DDRop Attack Forces Intel TDX Confidential VMs Into Debug Mode and Exposes Memory

KU Leuven and ETH Zurich researchers released DDRop PoC hardware that forces Intel TDX confidential VMs into debug mode and exposes plaintext memory.

Researchers from KU Leuven, ETH Zurich, Google, and Durham University published proof-of-concept code, hardware designs, and firmware for DDRop, a DDR5 interposer that injects parity errors to drop selected cache-line writebacks. Because Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP lack per-line cryptographic freshness, processors decrypt and accept stale DRAM contents as current state. The PoC flips a victim's ATTRIBUTES.DEBUG flag to enable TDX debug mode, then copies victim memory in plaintext and can forge attestation reports. Affected environments include Intel 5th- and 6th-generation Xeon Scalable with TDX; Intel says the attack falls outside its cloud-computing threat model.

GBHackers · 13h agoResearch

New GPUThor Rowhammer Defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A6000 to Gain Host Root Access

University of Toronto researchers present GPUThor, a Rowhammer attack that defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A4000-A6000 GDDR6 GPUs and achieves host root access.

GPUThor uses non-uniform hammering to bypass Target Row Refresh and overcome SECDED ECC on NVIDIA Ampere workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory, inducing 72,000 to 377,552 bit flips per gigabyte across RTX A6000, A5000, A4500, and A4000 cards. Triple-bit silent data corruption enables host privilege escalation to root with the IOMMU enabled, reusing GPUBreach page-table corruption techniques, and double-bit DUEs allow escalation when the IOMMU is disabled during a ~10 ms lazy-service window. The attack cut end-to-end escalation time on the A6000 from 21.9 hours to 1.1 minutes. Reported to NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, and AWS on April 29, 2026; findings were embargoed until August 25, 2026, and no CVE identifier was assigned.

The Hacker News · 7d agoResearch1

Code review used to be the only way to catch these bugs

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 says its NOVA system found 14,090 vulnerabilities in 3,915 open-source projects, mostly non-crashing bugs like access control flaws.

Unit 42's NOVA system analyzed 3,915 open-source projects over two months and reported 14,090 validated vulnerabilities, only 85 of which matched previously documented findings. 92% of findings fell outside fuzzing-friendly categories, clustering instead in access control, path traversal, injection, prototype pollution, and SSRF; language ecosystems showed distinct weakness profiles. Of 5,421 supply-chain findings, 1,280 were flaws in dependencies while 4,141 were downstream exposures, 2,776 validated with working proof-of-concepts. Unit 42 warned that faster discovery combined with an average 55-day patch deployment window has collapsed the patch-to-exploit gap.

Help Net Security · 21d agoResearch

$20 per zero-day is already the WordPress plugin reality

TrendAI and CHT Security used an AI pipeline to find over 300 verified WordPress plugin zero-days at roughly $20 per vulnerability.

A pipeline built in three days by TrendAI and CHT Security, presented at Ekoparty Miami, paired AI-driven static analysis with automated Docker provisioning and Chrome DevTools MCP dynamic verification to surface more than 300 critical zero-days in WordPress plugins within 72 hours. The run consumed about 222 million tokens across 95 tasks, averaging roughly $20 per verified vulnerability, with findings including pre-auth RCE, SQL injection, privilege escalation, SSRF, and an AI-assembled downgrade attack chain. Dynamic verification eliminated over 80% of false positives, but manual review at 30-60 minutes per finding remains the bottleneck, straining ZDI and NIST triage backlogs.

Help Net Security · 22d agoResearch1

Your Shredded Visa Card May Still Work at the Checkout

UMass Amherst researchers demonstrated expired Visa contactless cards can complete real purchases via relay attacks exploiting Visa Kernel 3's unsigned expiry date handling.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers presented at USENIX Security 2026 that expired Visa contactless cards can be revived for real purchases through an NFC man-in-the-middle attack on Visa's Kernel 3. The attack alters the expiry date the terminal sees (tag 5F24) while leaving the Track 2 Equivalent Data (tag 57) sent to the issuing bank unchanged, and the card's cryptographic signature does not cover the expiry date. Two Android phones emulating card and terminal relayed transactions within Visa's 500-millisecond limit. Mastercard, American Express, and Discover kernels blocked the attack, while Visa Kernel 3 did not; researchers also modified the Consumer Device Cardholder Verification Method flag at five US banks, and attackers can also exploit Terminal Verification Results zero-filling. Visa was notified in May 2025 and December 2025; no CVE has been assigned.

Security Affairs · 25d agoResearch

CDN Tsunami Attack Abuses HTTP/3 Translation for Up to 350x DoS Amplification

Researchers disclosed two DoS attacks exploiting CDNs' HTTP/3-to-HTTP/1.1 translation to amplify low-bandwidth requests up to 350x against origin servers.

Researchers named the two techniques HTTP/3 Bandwidth Amplification (HBA) and HTTP/3 Connection Amplification (HCA), exploiting the gap where CDNs speak HTTP/3 to browsers but only HTTP/1.1 to origins. All six tested CDNs (Alibaba, Baidu, Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly, Tencent) were susceptible to HBA, and five to HCA, with Cloudflare immune to HCA because it buffers full requests before opening backend connections. Attackers using under 5 Mbps forced over 100 Mbps at origins, and the 350x factor applies only to Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, which support the QPACK dynamic table. Testing identified 42,330 potentially vulnerable subdomains out of 151,685 hosted on the six providers across the Tranco Top 1M.

The Hacker News · 26d agoResearch