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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easytomy
Member

Posts: 53
Joined: 2017-05-08

#5543766 Posted on: 05/04/2018 09:11 AM

They might want to disclose how much Intel paid CTS Labs... That would be really interesting to know. Is it 1 mil $, is it 10 mil $, is it 100 mil $ ???
It is so obvious and so directly targeted that nobody is interested in what they found.

Vananovion
Senior Member

Posts: 151
Joined: 2017-08-31

#5543774 Posted on: 05/04/2018 09:53 AM

Is there still anyone who thinks this "security" company is concerned about anyones security? This was shady from the start and this kind of pestering and language only reinforces my doubts, even though the vulnerabilities are legitimate (but still quite useless for a potential attacker).

Kudos to AMD for handling this with grace.

kd7
Senior Member

Posts: 151
Joined: 2014-03-22

#5543781 Posted on: 05/04/2018 10:28 AM

LOL since when is secure encryption considered "security through obscurity"? And a "security" citing wikipedia articles? LOOOOL

jose2016
Senior Member

Posts: 109
Joined: 2016-12-31

#5543782 Posted on: 05/04/2018 10:28 AM

I completely agree. #1 and #2

386SX
Senior Member

Posts: 1196
Joined: 2017-06-26

#5543786 Posted on: 05/04/2018 10:56 AM

What does "CTS" stand for?:
Catch The Sperm :-)

(It's a PC game btw.!)

I cannot hear it anymore TBH. CTS here, CTS there. Publishing a 0-day without notifiying the vendor first, adding pressure and false accusations, bragging about the vendor is "not able to fix it in several weeks (as we said)" and so on.
1.) When came the point where you are able to define exactly how long "several weeks" are? Several weeks could be 50 weeks and still would be "in time". It's like "I need some time.". This doesn't specify exactly in what time neither. "Some time" could be 5 minutes, it could be 50 years.
2.) The behaviour (0-day, pressure, etc.) rings a lot of bells in my head, but not in the way I think of a "security researcher" or "security professional", that goes more in the direction "blackhat", "unethical" or at last "attention w*ore".

AMD did nothing wrong here (at least I am unable to see any wrongdoing).
Bullsh!t-bingo at its finest!

Btw.: Could you call this "cyber mobbing"? All indicators of classical mobbing are there: it happens not only once and over a (meanwhile) long period of time; it is only meant to destroy the reputation of one (usually individual, this time a company); false accusations and other unehtical methods are used to fulfil the goal, etc. etc. => sounds like mobbing to me.
What do you guys think? :-)

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