What we learned about TEE security from auditing WhatsApp

Summary: Trail of Bits published a pre-launch audit of WhatsApp's Private Inference feature, which processes encrypted messages inside AMD SEV-SNP and Nvidia confidential GPU enclaves, and identified 28 issues including eight high-severity findings that could have bypassed the system's privacy guarantees. The findings included configuration files loaded after the attestation measurement was taken (TOB-WAPI-13), ACPI tables excluded from measurement (TOB-WAPI-17), firmware patch levels trusted from the attestation report rather than verified against AMD's VCEK certificate (TOB-WAPI-8), and attestation reports lacking a client nonce, allowing indefinite replay (TOB-WAPI-7).
Why it matters: A single compromise of a TEE could have become a permanent backdoor: without a client nonce in the attestation report, an attacker could replay a stolen attestation and TLS keys to run a fake server that every connecting WhatsApp user would trust with their messages.

Read the original at Trail of Bits Blog ↗

Topics: Vulnerabilities & Patching
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