If you have been following our coverage regarding the recent security issues found in AMD’s processors and chipsets by security research firm CTS-Labs, it has been a bit of a doozy. Today AMD is posting on their website, in the form of a blog post, the results from their initial analysis, despite CTS-Labs only giving them 1-day notice, rather than the industry standard 60/90-days, as they felt that these were too important and expected AMD to fix them in a much longer timescale. Despite this attitude, AMD’s blog post dictates that all the issues found can be patched and mitigated in the next few weeks without any performance degradation.

The salient high-level takeaway from AMD is this:

  1. All the issues can be confirmed on related AMD hardware, but require Admin Access at the metal
  2. All the issues are set to be fixed within weeks, not months, through firmware patches and BIOS updates
  3. No performance impact expected
  4. None of these issues are Zen-specific, but relate to the PSP and ASMedia chipsets.
  5. These are not related to the GPZ exploits earlier this year.

AMD’s official statement is as follows:

Initial AMD Technical Assessment of CTS Labs Research

On March 12, 2018, AMD received a communication from CTS Labs regarding research into security vulnerabilities involving some AMD products. Less than 24 hours later, the research firm went public with its findings. Security and protecting users’ data is of the utmost importance to us at AMD and we have worked rapidly to assess this security research and develop mitigation plans where needed. This is our first public update on this research, and will cover both our technical assessment of the issues as well as planned mitigation actions.

The security issues identified by the third-party researchers are not related to the AMD “Zen” CPU architecture or the Google Project Zero exploits made public Jan. 3, 2018. Instead, these issues are associated with the firmware managing the embedded security control processor in some of our products (AMD Secure Processor) and the chipset used in some socket AM4 and socket TR4 desktop platforms supporting AMD processors.

As described in more detail below, AMD has rapidly completed its assessment and is in the process of developing and staging the deployment of mitigations. It’s important to note that all the issues raised in the research require administrative access to the system, a type of access that effectively grants the user unrestricted access to the system and the right to delete, create or modify any of the folders or files on the computer, as well as change any settings. Any attacker gaining unauthorized administrative access would have a wide range of attacks at their disposal well beyond the exploits identified in this research. Further, all modern operating systems and enterprise-quality hypervisors today have many effective security controls, such as Microsoft Windows Credential Guard in the Windows environment, in place to prevent unauthorized administrative access that would need to be overcome in order to affect these security issues. A useful clarification of the difficulties associated with successfully exploiting these issues can be found in this posting from Trail of Bits, an independent security research firm who were contracted by the third-party researchers to verify their findings.

Mark Papermaster,
Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer

This is followed by a table describing the issues, stating that each issue can be solved by BIOS/firmware updates in the coming weeks. AMD is also set to provide additional updates on the analysis of the issues and mitigation plans over that time. AMD is also prominent about addressing the security issues only, over any others that might have been discussed.

Source: AMD

Related Reading

Comments Locked

101 Comments

View All Comments

  • chobao - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    Ian, are you gonna do another piece with CTS- Labs Response :D

    sometimes drama is nice haha
  • Krysto - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    So they'll fix even the ASMedia backdoor? Interesting.

    And the fact that there were so many PSP bugs to begin with is AMD's fault. They should open up the firmware, as requested many of its customers.
  • chobao - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    proprietary software maybe..but ya..would be nice to open source stuff
  • hescominsoon - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    The PSP flaws require a previous machine compromise unlike the Intel ME bugs which did NOT require an existing compromise. Call for Intel's firmware to be opened AND actually start a movement to get this action done and you will have some credibility.
  • BurntMyBacon - Wednesday, March 21, 2018 - link

    You are not going to convince Intel to open source their ME firmware not matter how hard you demand it. They've already been called to do so to no avail. To be fair, Intel's ME is much more capable than AMD's PSP, particularly with the ability to initiate functions remotely (I.E. over the internet). Regardless of how good (or bad?) Intel's security is on the ME, it's not something Intel wants in the crosshairs. I don't expect AMD will give up their PSP firmware either. I don't fully agree with this stance, but I can understand not wanting to expose such critical firmware to the masses and I don't expect either company to deviate from it.
  • ikeke1 - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    (Y)
  • YukaKun - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    Thanks for the great coverage Ian!

    Much appreciated!
  • chobao - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    so CTS released POC video on youtube...today

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrhVhFHTe9o
  • chobao - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    why would they release something like this publicly...didn't they say they would never release it publicly >.>
  • SkyBill40 - Tuesday, March 20, 2018 - link

    Why? Isn't it clear? They don't have a damned clue what they're doing other than attempting to manipulate the stock valuation on a short. Anything and everything that can be done to affect that seems to be in their playbook.

    That said, I'm glad to see AMD making what amounts to a retaliatory counter by reporting the unusual stock activity to the SEC.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now