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posted by takyon on Sunday January 07 2018, @06:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the end-of-trusted-computing dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

AMD has fixed, but not yet released BIOS/UEFI/firmware updates for the general public for a security flaw affecting the AMD Secure Processor.

[...] Cfir Cohen, a security researcher with the Google Cloud Security Team, says he discovered a vulnerability in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) of the AMD Secure Processor. The TPM is a component to store critical system data such as passwords, certificates, and encryption keys, in a secure environment and outside of the more easily accessible AMD cores.

"Through manual static analysis, we've found a stack-based overflow in the function EkCheckCurrentCert," Cohen says. The researcher claims that an attacker could use specially-crafted EK certificates to get remote code execution rights on the AMD Secure Processor, allowing him to compromise its security.

Cohen said that some basic mitigation techniques such as "stack cookies, NX stack, ASLR" were not implemented in AMD's Secure Processor, making exploitation trivial.

takyon: This bug is unrelated to Meltdown and Spectre. And you might be interested in this:

Coincidentally, on Reddit [1, 2], some users reported seeing a new option to disable AMD PSP support, but it's unclear if this new option is related to the patches AMD was preparing to roll out for Cohen's findings.

Source: Security Flaw in AMD's Secure Chip-On-Chip Processor Disclosed Online


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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday January 07 2018, @07:38PM

    by zocalo (302) on Sunday January 07 2018, @07:38PM (#619255)
    You could also just make the updates downloadable over the Internet as a signed binary blob. Download to USB stick, plug the stick into the vehicle, and wait for it to be verified and applied - pretty much the same process used by most cameras these days. If the user doesn't want to apply the updates themselves, I'm sure there are plenty of mechanics willing to do it for a fee/for free (my current car gets a firmware check and any updates applied for free as an line-item on a dealer service), and if they don't want to apply a given update at all I'm sure there are plenty of mechanics that will honour that request too.
    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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