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Security Researchers Publish Ryzen Flaws, Gave AMD 24 hours Prior Notice
Through the advent of Meltdown and Spectre, there is a heightened element of nervousness around potential security flaws in modern high-performance processors, especially those that deal with the core and critical components of company business and international infrastructure. Today, CTS-Labs, a security company based in Israel, has published a whitepaper identifying four classes of potential vulnerabilities of the Ryzen, EPYC, Ryzen Pro, and Ryzen Mobile processor lines. AMD is in the process of responding to the claims, but was only given 24 hours of notice rather than the typical 90 days for standard vulnerability disclosure. No official reason was given for the shortened time.
[...] At this point AMD has not confirmed any of the issues brought forth in the CTS-Labs whitepaper, so we cannot confirm in the findings are accurate. It has been brought to our attention that some press were pre-briefed on the issue, perhaps before AMD was notified, and that the website that CTS-Labs has setup for the issue was registered on February 22nd, several weeks ago. Given the level of graphics on the site, it does look like a planned 'announcement' has been in the works for a little while, seemingly with little regard for AMD's response on the issue. This is compared to Meltdown and Spectre, which was shared among the affected companies several months before a planned public disclosure. CTS-Labs has also hired a PR firm to deal with incoming requests for information, which is also an interesting avenue to the story, as this is normally not the route these security companies take. CTS-Labs is a security focused research firm, but does not disclose its customers or research leading to this disclosure. CTS-Labs was started in 2017, and this is their first public report.
CTS-Labs' claims revolve around AMD's Secure Processor and Promontory Chipset, and fall into four main categories, which CTS-Labs has named for maximum effect. Each category has sub-sections within.
Severe Security Advisory on AMD Processors from CTS.
Also at Tom's Hardware, Motherboard, BGR, Reuters, and Ars Technica.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 14 2018, @03:01PM
With the Ryzen/Threadripper and Core i9 launches, we've pretty much gotten to that point. And the wide availability of 8+ cores will hopefully lead to more parallelism where possible.
As for the baggage, maybe Intel could do something silly like use EMIB to put ARM cores on every x86 chip. Or make their chips more FPGA-like. But I expect they will just accumulate more baggage, save for some features cut down due to known security risks.
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