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by mike_hearn 250 days ago
That's how it works already. The memory is encrypted. However, the SGX/SEV model is a very powerful and flexible one - different entities who don't trust one another can share the same hardware simultaneously. If you encrypt all of RAM under a single key, then you can start up a malicious enclave, do some writes - which the CPU will encrypt - capture those writes and redirect them to the memory of a different enclave, and now you can overwrite the memory of that other enclave with your own cleartext.

That such attacks are possible was known from the start. What they're doing here is exploiting the fact that Intel (knowingly!) enabled some hardware attacks on SGX in order to allow enclaves to scale up to much larger amounts of RAM consumed.