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New DDRop Attack Breaks Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP Confidential Computing
DDRop uses a sub-$200 DDR5 interposer to drop memory writes, breaking Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP confidentiality guarantees.
Researchers at KU Leuven, ETH Zurich, Durham University, and Google will present DDRop at ACM CCS 2026, a first active interposer attack on DDR5 that silently drops memory writes so processors keep reading stale encrypted data, exploiting the missing freshness guarantee in Intel TDX, Intel Scalable SGX, and AMD SEV-SNP. On Intel TDX's default logical integrity mode it enabled reading victim VM memory, toggling debug mode, and forging remote attestation; AMD SEV-SNP was limited to copying pages between VMs. TDX's stronger cryptographic integrity blocks cross-VM attacks but likely not attestation forgery. The team will release board designs, firmware, and attack code on GitHub; no evidence of real-world use exists and no simple patch is available.
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AD Rights Management Service (Part 2): Extraction, Offline Decryption, and the Unrotatable Key
Huntress research shows AD RMS SLC root key is unrotatable and never expires, so its compromise permanently exposes all RMS-protected documents.
Part 2 of Huntress's AD RMS series details server-side attacks: extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key and performing offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC key has no expiry or rotation mechanism, with a 255-year certificate validity (2002–2258), so whoever recovers it can decrypt every document the deployment ever protected, indefinitely. The author released SharpRMS, a unified tool combining the 2016 DisARMS client-side attacks with new server-side key extraction and decryption capabilities. The research frames the SLC as comparable to KRBTGT and the DPAPI domain backup key, though not equivalent to domain compromise.
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AD Rights Management Service (Part 1): Architecture, Deprecation, and Reconnaissance
Huntress maps AD RMS architecture and recon paths, setting up an offline key-extraction attack against its unrotatable 255-year root key.
Huntress's multi-part research examines Active Directory Rights Management Services, Microsoft's enterprise DRM role that still ships in Windows Server 2025 despite migration guidance favoring Azure Information Protection. Part 1 covers the trust model and how an ordinary domain account can locate RMS clusters and read rights-policy templates. Part 2 will detail four independent paths for extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key via service-group membership and the configuration database, enabling fully offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC certificate is valid from 2002 to 2258 and has no key-rotation mechanism, so a stolen key decrypts protected content indefinitely.
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Your Cloud Security Checklist Doesn't Work the Way You Think It Does
Intruder's 2026 Cloud Security Index found misconfiguration risk profiles differ sharply across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud across 3,000 organizations.
Intruder analyzed misconfiguration data from 3,000 organizations across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud for its 2026 Cloud Security Index. Weak IAM controls and missing logging affected 80-98% of accounts regardless of provider, while exposed services ranged from 76% on AWS to just 8% on Google Cloud. Top issues included S3 buckets without HTTPS enforcement (87% of AWS accounts), Entra ID users without MFA (55% of Azure accounts), and missing OS Login MFA (77% of Google Cloud accounts). Weak IAM prevalence rose with organization size, from 87% at SMEs to 98% at large enterprises, and midmarket organizations took the longest to remediate at 35 days on average.
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Attack Paths Into VMs in the Cloud
Unit 42 maps attack paths into AWS, Azure, and GCP VMs through intended features like startup scripts and SSH key pushes.
Palo Alto Unit 42 reviewed attack vectors against virtual machine services on AWS, Azure, and GCP, finding that 11% of internet-exposed cloud hosts carry Critical or High severity vulnerabilities. The attack paths rely on legitimate features such as EC2 User Data, VM custom data, EC2 Instance Connect, SSM Run Command, and serial consoles rather than vulnerabilities, and exploiting them requires attackers to first obtain control plane permissions. A compromised VM exposes not only its data but the workload identity and cloud permissions assigned to it, making identity compromise potentially more damaging than data theft. The firm places mitigation responsibility on cloud users and administrators.
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