Papers › SEVerity: Code Injection Attacks against Encrypted Virtual Machines
SEVerity: Code Injection Attacks against Encrypted Virtual Machines
Mathias Morbitzer, Sergej Proskurin, Martin Radev, Marko Dorfhuber, Erick Quintanar Salas
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Modern enterprises increasingly take advantage of cloud infrastructures. Yet, outsourcing code and data into the cloud requires enterprises to trust cloud providers not to meddle with their data. To reduce the level of trust towards cloud providers, AMD has introduced Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). By encrypting Virtual Machines (VMs), SEV aims to ensure data confidentiality, despite a compromised or curious Hypervisor. The SEV Encrypted State (SEV-ES) extension additionally protects the VM's register state from unauthorized access. Yet, both extensions do not provide integrity of the VM's memory, which has already been abused to leak the protected data or to alter the VM's control-flow. In this paper, we introduce the SEVerity attack; a missing puzzle piece in the series of attacks against the AMD SEV family. Specifically, we abuse the system's lack of memory integrity protection to inject and execute arbitrary code within SEV-ES-protected VMs. Contrary to previous code execution attacks against the AMD SEV family, SEVerity neither relies on a specific CPU version nor on any code gadgets inside the VM. Instead, SEVerity abuses the fact that SEV-ES prohibits direct memory access into the encrypted memory. Specifically, SEVerity injects arbitrary code into the encrypted VM through I/O channels and uses the Hypervisor to locate and trigger the execution of the encrypted payload. This allows us to sidestep the protection mechanisms of SEV-ES. Overall, our results demonstrate a success rate of 100% and hence highlight that memory integrity protection is an obligation when encrypting VMs. Consequently, our work presents the final stroke in a series of attacks against AMD SEV and SEV-ES and renders the present implementation as incapable of protecting against a curious, vulnerable, or malicious Hypervisor.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections