New VMScape attack breaks guest-host isolation on AMD, Intel CPUs
2025-09-11
A new Spectre-like attack dubbed VMScape allows a malicious virtual machine (VM) to leak cryptographic keys from an unmodified QEMU hypervisor process running on modern AMD or Intel CPUs. [...]
A new Spectre-like attack dubbed VMScape allows a malicious virtual machine (VM) to leak cryptographic keys from an unmodified QEMU hypervisor process running on modern AMD or Intel CPUs.
The attack breaks the isolation between VMs and the cloud hypervisor, bypassing existing Spectre mitigations and threatening to leak sensitive data by leveraging speculative execution.