Philipp Deppenwiese

In the industry, speculative execution mitigations have been discussed for some time, but most people focus on the operating system level in order to adopt them in software stacks. What is happening at firmware level? When it comes to applying mitigations, how does the industry take advantage of them, and who controls their adoption in the firmware? Those are all good questions, but unfortunately no positive news can be shared. SMM attack vectors will be discussed in this talk from the perspective of attacking the operating system or hypervisor from the firmware. The nature of these attacks breaks the foundation of confidential computing and often creates problems for the entire industry. This talk will focus on practical examples of such attacks and how they are dangerous.