Researchers discover potentially catastrophic exploit present in AMD chips for decades

some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to Technology@lemmy.world – 207 points –
Researchers discover potentially catastrophic exploit present in AMD chips for decades
engadget.com

Intel breathes a sigh of relief as the spotlight moves off of them for a beat.

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Except the AMD exploit requires ring 0 access and is almost irrelevant to most users, whereas the Intel issues are physically destroying people's computers. The scale of the issues are utterly incomparable.

I'm much more angry with whatever dipshit at AMD decided to revoke permission for ZLUDA, and that they haven't yet been fired.

People grant kernel access all the time without thinking. Video game anti-cheat is a good example. It's a pretty potent vector of attack since you can never trust these companies to keep themselves secure.

Apex Legends and Genshin Impact being a good example of this.

The Apex Legends hacking situation was unrelated to the anti-cheat despite initial reports. It didn't stop the hack but it also wasn't the vector for the attacks.

Genshin Impact's anti-cheat however was an unmitigated disaster.

Didn't the author confirm the takedown came from AMD and not NVidia? AMD isn't responsible for third party software running on their hardware.

Although, IIRC they either sanctioned it or provided some initial funding, which might have put them in a more culpable position. Still, I'm pretty sure the takedown came from AMD, and it doesn't make sense that they're doing NVidia's policing for then.

They were paying for its development for about a year and a half.

Yeah, that'd do it. Although, again, it looks like the restriction wasn't in the NVIDIA licensing wording until recently. IANAL, but you it both parties are required to agree to contract changes; if AMD's contributions were all pre-wording change, they merely need to dust their hands; it's OSS. Why are they doing NVIDIA's dirty work for them?

I'm not convinced.

I'm thinking there are more things like this, and maybe even some are intentionally put in to please government actors. Intels management engine is like a small computer inside the computer, and amd has something simular. This computer can work completely independent of what the main computer does and has network access.

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what's ZLUDA? can you ELI5?

ZLUDA was an open source translation layer for CUDA. So basically developers could take code from projects written for Nvidia's CUDA and use ZLUDA to run them on other hardware. Originally the dev was focused on Intel but AMD started paying him and he focused on AMD hardware. They stopped funding him earlier in the year and now it appears AMD legal has gone back on their earlier permission for him to keep distributing the code.

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