AMD has readied patches against MasterKey, Fallout, and Chimera vulnerabilities

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 05/04/2018 08:45 AM | source: | 28 comment(s)

AMD has finished up its patches for vulnerabilities that security company CTS Labs announced last month. The chip designer reports that the updates for, among others, Epyc chips are in the final phase of testing and should become available next month through a Firmware patch.

CTS Labs announced the bugs unexpectedly and without any warning a while ago, according to the security company, it would take many months to close the vulnerabilities. CTS recently once more contacted Toms Hardware to 'express their concern about the lack of updates from AMD regarding these vulnerabilities'. The company said it believed many of the vulnerabilities 'would take months to fix'. One of them, Chimera, would even require a hardware change.

According to AMD we can expect updates this month, AMD has explained to Tom's Hardware. Ecosystem partners should already have the new patches for internal testing with this response:

Within approximately 30 days of being notified by CTS Labs, AMD released patches to our ecosystem partners mitigating all of the CTS identified vulnerabilities on our EPYC platform as well as patches mitigating Chimera across all AMD platforms. These patches are in final testing with our ecosystem partners in advance of being released publicly. We remain on track to begin releasing patches to our ecosystem partners for the other products identified in the report this month. We expect these patches to be released publicly as our ecosystem partners complete their validation work.

Let us again reiterate, the vulnerabilities within the AMD systems require admin privileges and for most things, physical access to the hardware to modify things, thus a local exploit in a context where Admin Access Rights are needed.

Meanwhile, CTS labs pushed another document full of accusations, released May 1st this month (there's not a single word on Intel recent or upcoming Vulnerabilities on their websites, of course):

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xIcarus
Senior Member

Posts: 945
Joined: 2010-08-24

#5544098 Posted on: 05/05/2018 10:51 AM

AMD has encrypted portions of its PSP firmware. However, this 'Security by Obscurity' does not fix any of the vulnerabilities CTS discovered.

Bahahaha encryption is not security through obscurity you dumb fucks.
Who pays these guys? You have to be mentally incapable of paying such incompetent people in order to make other people look bad.

moo100times
Senior Member

Posts: 196
Joined: 2012-06-24

#5544207 Posted on: 05/05/2018 07:05 PM

I find it funny how this time round so many sites that were claiming that the claims from CTS were valid are all suspiciously staying quiet about this, and now also being quiet around the new round of Spectre Variant flaws particularly impacting Intel chips. The biases of the tech news sources are beginning to strongly reveal themselves, glad guru3d still has integrity to report it all!

AsiJu
Senior Member

Posts: 6443
Joined: 2010-10-16

#5544211 Posted on: 05/05/2018 07:18 PM

I guess it's good that AMD made patches to these "problems", just to appease the naysayers who would otherwise use their could-have-been "negligence" as flak, but at the same time I feel a little bit irritated that AMD is, in a way, justifying their actions. Don't feed the trolls.

So they should sue them for $10? Because that's probably all they're going to get out of it. :p

Lols, yeah.

Well CTS having a court ruling demanding they pay AMD a few million in damage control would at least slow those scammers down the next time.

Yes, I'll still applaud Hilbert for the professional news bit he wrote earlier and now this one.

Thank you G3D.

The Reeferman
Member

Posts: 96
Joined: 2013-11-10

#5544447 Posted on: 05/07/2018 02:08 AM

Well CTS having a court ruling demanding they pay AMD a few million in damage control would at least slow those scammers down the next time.

I think Intel's budget for marketing purposes is big enough to pay the bills, if they win more then they loose in the end it won't stop them. Although this attempt seems to have failed to damage AMD's reputation in any meaningful way.

Size_Mick
Senior Member

Posts: 530
Joined: 2002-03-22

#5544486 Posted on: 05/07/2018 09:44 AM

What, CTS Labs is still there?

Also gotta love this:

AMD:
"... as well as patches mitigating Chimera across all AMD platforms..."

CTS Labs:
"... CHIMERA cannot be directly fixed..."

Not saying anything good about CTS here, but I do wish to point out that mitigating is not the same as fixing. If it matters to anyone, it might be a good idea to get a clear answer from AMD on this particular point.

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