Cutting corners? in my understanding this kind of "side channel" attack is different kind of hacking altogether. Probung to non existent port. Listening to non ezistent channel. More to creativity from the hacker side rather than recklessness, let alone cutting corners, from the manufacturer side.
AMD CPUs are vulnerable to a severe new side-channel attack
- Thread starter mongeese
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For submission; there are often a section stating explicit conflict of interest, maybe this is for RSC/ACS (Chemistry) journals. But you are right, the potential conflict of interests are stated in acknowledgments or as part of author information; it is not the most bold part, certainly not a part you will be able to access without full access to the article.
Still, while is nice to have it stated on the landing page for the article, but for a majority it will simply be "The authors declare the following competing financial interest(s)". But the intel acknowledgement is there, it isn't exactly hidden since this paper seemingly is open access at this point (is not entirely sensible to put all acknowledgement bold, sometimes this section takes a quarter of a page), so I really have no issue with it the paper as it is.
But, I googled the last author, Daniel Gruss, an assistant professor. He have 3 papers with "Intel" as title (and they are from last 2 years), and they aren't flattering. He have a paper on Skylake processors, and another 5 with Spectre/Meltdown. I am a lay person when it comes to cyber security, but again, the papers does seem to be about problems. Whereas save this new conference paper, there hasn't been any papers exclusively about the new AMD processors authored by him. While I am sure Intel won't exactly mind them looking at AMD processors, he does have a track record at exploiting Intel processors even, as they claimed, Intel giving them generous gifts. And those Intel papers did not state any help from Intel so... meh. I am satisfy this is not simply an Intel paper
The only thing I wish to know is what exactly are those gifts as it could be wine, money or something logical like hardware.
Beerfloat
Posts: 1,018 +1,927
To be expected. Now that there are actually enough AMD CPUs out there to make them worth investigating you'll be seeing more exploits uncovered over time.
tomkaten
Posts: 309 +280
Hah ! Honestly, this thread could have ended right there.
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Not many vulnerabilities are found in AMD CPUs because researchers focus on the top player, that is Intel. Give time to AMD to get to the top and you'll see an abundance of vulnerabilities on their products as well.
Irata
Posts: 2,290 +4,004
That‘s a bit of a standard line - AMD has not been thoroughly researched yet. While Intel is the clear market leader, it‘s not like there are not Millions of AMD CPU out there. They aren‘t at 1% market share. Also, I would say that there is a commercial interest in finding security issues on AMD as we have seen with „Ryzenfall“.
In this case, it appears to be an AMD architecture specific exploit (just as the majority of previous exploits were Intel architecture specific), so maybe AMD CPU have not been as thoroughly investigated from this angle. But you cannot really say no one is looking.
To note that all recent security exploits have also been checked on AMD CPU, and afaik even on Arm and IBM.
Speaking of Arm - should that not be the most investigated architecture as this architecture is basically everywhere? So by your logic, a lot more exploits should have been discovered for Arm.
Beerfloat
Posts: 1,018 +1,927
The majority of the exploits are various revisions of Spectre and Meltdown, versions of which affect many chip designs, by no means limited to just Intel. AMD, IBMs POWER, and all sorts of ARM based chips are all affected by some revision or the other. Out of order and speculative execution are widely used techniques nowadays.
Also, the vast majority of ARM designs in the wild are either embedded, or exclusively running sandboxed, curated content from the Apple and Google stores, and as such are inherently less interesting targets/less likely to run exploited code.
Shadowboxer
Posts: 2,074 +1,655
This hugely embarrassing for AMD. All CPUs have multiple vulnerabilities (yes even Ryzen). The more we become aware of the more secure that CPU becomes. But this is embarrassing as Intel found AMDs vulnerability for them.
It’s been apparent for some time that AMD seem to be uninterested in funding research into finding vulnerabilities in their own hardware. Possibly motivated in part by the fact that the tech community are *****s and for some reason condemn Intel for performing the same research on their own parts. Everyone loves to jump on the hate bandwagon whenever Intel announce they have discovered a new hole in the hardware. But really this is no different to an aircraft manufacturer performing crash testing.
This means that Intel are plugging their security holes and allows software producers to mitigate threats aswell. AMD however is not fixing their vulnerabilities because they simply don’t know what they are. This news should be prompting the community to ask why AMD didn’t find this vulnerability and as to why AMD are currently offering no incentive to anyone to hunt for vulnerabilities. And that AMD owe Intel thanks for highlighting this, its not in Intel’s commercial interest to highlight this to AMD however it is in the community’s general interest in security.
And to the community members who live in the delusional fantasy world where Intel is evil and AMD is a good you should be thanking Intel for allowing AMD to take steps to make their CPUs more secure. However, I have no doubt the low intelligence of these people will lead them to believe this is a “smear” campaign against their beloved AMD.
Of course, this vulnerability like the many Intel vulnerabilities discovered over the last few years are purely theoretical and not worth worrying about at all for single home users.
It’s been apparent for some time that AMD seem to be uninterested in funding research into finding vulnerabilities in their own hardware. Possibly motivated in part by the fact that the tech community are *****s and for some reason condemn Intel for performing the same research on their own parts. Everyone loves to jump on the hate bandwagon whenever Intel announce they have discovered a new hole in the hardware. But really this is no different to an aircraft manufacturer performing crash testing.
This means that Intel are plugging their security holes and allows software producers to mitigate threats aswell. AMD however is not fixing their vulnerabilities because they simply don’t know what they are. This news should be prompting the community to ask why AMD didn’t find this vulnerability and as to why AMD are currently offering no incentive to anyone to hunt for vulnerabilities. And that AMD owe Intel thanks for highlighting this, its not in Intel’s commercial interest to highlight this to AMD however it is in the community’s general interest in security.
And to the community members who live in the delusional fantasy world where Intel is evil and AMD is a good you should be thanking Intel for allowing AMD to take steps to make their CPUs more secure. However, I have no doubt the low intelligence of these people will lead them to believe this is a “smear” campaign against their beloved AMD.
Of course, this vulnerability like the many Intel vulnerabilities discovered over the last few years are purely theoretical and not worth worrying about at all for single home users.
Raytrace3D
Posts: 425 +506
While Intel engineers attempt to fix their crap, their marketing department is hard at work... If you can't say anything good about yourself, make it seem the next guy looks just as bad... lol Must suck to be in marketing at Intel right now.
Irata
Posts: 2,290 +4,004
You do realize that university security researchers - some of whom are now personally sponsored by Intel - found this security issue, just as they did many more serious Intel related issues before.
It was not Intel themselves.
It was not Intel themselves.
Irata
Posts: 2,290 +4,004
Afaik Meltdown does not affect AMD and neither does Zombieload. Some Spectre variants do affect AMD but to a lesser degree than Intel.
This is due to different design decisions wrt speed vs security.
I am not under the illusion that AMD‘s CPU are immune against all security vulnerabilities but there is a considerable difference between them and Intel.
If you were a Ford owner in the 70s you could have rightfully pointed out that all cars can potentially burn, but that did not negate the fact that the Pinto was much more likely to burst into flames due to Ford cutting corners in its design.
"f you were a Ford owner in the 70s" ALL their car door keys were the same (uk) . My Ford escort key would open my friends Ford Cortine, and vice versa.Hard to believe but true.
Peter Kazmir
Posts: 7 +12
AMD has over 31% market share on x86 CPUs as of the end of 2019; I'm sure it's even (slightly) higher now.
And this is an Intel funded article. Funny. I can have that much of physical access to a server. I don't need this so-called "security flaw." A few bit of meta-data? How much of meta-data is needed to reconstruct an entire database schemas? and even with an entire database schemas, it is useless unless you have another backdoor to take use. And if there is a backdoor, you don't even need this "flaw" to start attacking. Just what the heck is Intel is doing? Downplaying competitor by spending millions to make up something that doesn't exist? So desperate.
JimboJoneson
Posts: 310 +507
You mean more Intel funding?
(regardless, its good it was found, but no one is going to be doing any hacking into your computer with this flaw)Spectre and some side channel style attacks are too difficult to properly exploit anyway; If someone has the motivation to try to hack your computer using these methods, you probably have far more serious problems to deal with. - same with spectre in re: to Intel. Most of these issues don't concern 99.999% of all people. I mean who really ran out and patched their Intel CPUs for all the myriad of recent flaws and variations thereof? Almost no one.
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Evernessince
Posts: 5,469 +6,160
You are just straight up wrong here. Please go back to those exploits and read which CPUs are affected.
No, not really. The article clearly states this is a combination of methods and is very hard to pull off. Not to mention it was at the very least partially FUNDED BY INTEL.
The rest of your comment is a rant making a series of incorrect assumptions. You apply a double standard that AMD has undisclosed security vulnerabilities when it is ironically far more likely that Intel still has far more.
EClyde
Posts: 2,404 +952
I avoid the "Elite"
Irata
Posts: 2,290 +4,004
What I am still missing is a good analysis of the paper in simpler terms that also checks if AMD‘s comment on this is correct, or not.
So - what kind of data can be retrieved by this, are any of the multiple attack vectors already patched, does this work on a current Windows / Linux system, how easy is it to fall victim if this....?
So - what kind of data can be retrieved by this, are any of the multiple attack vectors already patched, does this work on a current Windows / Linux system, how easy is it to fall victim if this....?
Beerfloat
Posts: 1,018 +1,927
You should follow your advice. And then retract your statement.
Evernessince
Posts: 5,469 +6,160
Facts, you can't beat them:
AMD : Security vulnerabilities, CVEs
Security vulnerabilities related to AMD : List of vulnerabilities affecting any product of this vendor
www.cvedetails.com
Intel : Security vulnerabilities, CVEs
Security vulnerabilities related to Intel : List of vulnerabilities affecting any product of this vendor
www.cvedetails.com
Now why would I retract a true statement?
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Bit hard to say if it's correct or not, as the statement is essentially saying "we're aware of the research done" and that one should just "keep all software up to date and follow normal security procedures." That's giving much away, to read between the lines, but my take on it is that, given the setup of the attack ("...the attacker has unprivileged native code execution on the target machine and runs on the same logical CPU core as the victim...the attacker can [also] force the execution of the victim’s code") is that the findings are correct, but software fixes for this already exist. Naturally it's in the interest of security to not say too much about what those fixes are.
Pretty much anything data based, given that the attack is using the routines performed by the Level 1 Data cache predictor to figure out what memory accesses have taken place by a CPU core. The more complex the data pattern though, the harder it is to untangle.
No announcement appears to have been made, so...yes/no? ASLR attacks aren't new, and the implementation/use of it in operating systems varies quite a bit (Windows kinda uses, Linux definitely does), so it's hard to gauge the response against those attacks. In the case of tracing the memory accesses, AMD may have already fixed that in a microcode release, and just kept quiet about it.
Yes, both.
Doesn't seem to be easy at all, provided one follows normal security procedures - I.e. keep every up-to-date, use appropriate anti-virus software, avoid dodgy websites, don't run with scissors, and never walk under a ladder, holding a black cat, on any Friday 13th.
And who is sponsoring the universities that pump out Intel vulnerabilities? Intel? Why there was no real interest in this subject until 2-3 years ago and then boom. Vulnerabilities are pouring and Intel products are suddenly seen as trash worthy items. I doubt this is done in the name of security and more in the name of ruining a reputation of a specific brand.
JimboJoneson
Posts: 310 +507
$0?
They funded the research, I'm sure that's all (media would galdly take it from there). At the end of the day, it just means that security is being watched out for and we are being informed, and the vendors are being informed the public knows, even if they new before-hand.
Its all good.
As long as none of the CTS labs/viceroy BS starts happening again, and this is done professionally and follows some basic standards, I'm all for Intel and AMD to out each other's security flaws if the come across them or pay for it or whatever.
As long as the info is honest and accurately reported, no problem.
Wouldn't you agree?
Paying for the research against a competitor is one thing you can judge one way, but you can also say the result of that is good, even if the initial action is sketchy -- all of that can be true and accurate.
Don't forget time as valid dimension.
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