AMD processors from 2011 to 2019 vulnerable to two new attacks

Scougar · 9 Mar 2020 at 12:07

Intel-Funded Study Finds AMD Processors Including All Ryzen Chips Vulnerable To Side-Channel Security Flaw

What... A ... Surprise.

This is my surprised face /S

Intel funded studies to tear down competition because their own CPUs have so many flaws.

jigger · 9 Mar 2020 at 12:21

b00merang69 said:
I never said I was, does it matter what is more an issue than the other both are issues and again will not effect the majority of home users.

Like someone above stated, when its Intel bring out the pitch forks and when its AMD its not a big deal...

But that is what you are saying isn’t it. I don’t see why you lot are calling for outrage when one company is knowingly selling chips based on seriously flawed hardware and the other isn’t.

Sorry if you was expecting this thread to yield fruit for your cause.

ChrisLX200 · 9 Mar 2020 at 12:48

of course there would be no ulterior motive in this Intel-sponsored study. Of course not.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 9 Mar 2020 at 12:54

Orange Nexus said:
Cacheout bypasses mitigations for Fallout and Zombieload. No known fixes for it yet.

I was reading it was a hardware problem.

b00merang69 · 9 Mar 2020 at 14:21

jigger said:
But that is what you are saying isn’t it. I don’t see why you lot are calling for outrage when one company is knowingly selling chips based on seriously flawed hardware and the other isn’t.

Sorry if you was expecting this thread to yield fruit for your cause.

Who is your lot (I am not an Intel Fanboy, you obv never read the other thread), I was AMD CPU's all the way to Intel C2D and lets be honest AMD made one lacklustre CPU after another in recent years until now.

I have no case so you are talking nonsense, It is news same as the Intel flaws seems to be big news here, and once again if Intel paid for it or part of it, it was from the same source who found their flaws so why is it real when it is Intel and fake when it it AMD?.

Scougar · 9 Mar 2020 at 14:26

b00merang69 said:
Who is your lot (I am not an Intel Fanboy, you obv never read the other thread), I was AMD CPU's all the way to Intel C2D and lets be honest AMD made one lacklustre CPU after another in recent years until now.

I have no case so you are talking nonsense, It is news same as the Intel flaws seems to be big news here, and once again if Intel paid for it or part of it, it was from the same source who found their flaws so why is it real when it is Intel and fake when it it AMD?.

They are flaws, but being hyped. Unlike the current Intel bugs that can actually be exploited.

"I want you to find something.. anything for a campaign"

"Here you go... We bypassed a load of other protection to simulate an attack, that is almost impossible to get working".

Rroff · 9 Mar 2020 at 14:37

jigger said:
But that is what you are saying isn’t it. I don’t see why you lot are calling for outrage when one company is knowingly selling chips based on seriously flawed hardware and the other isn’t.

Sorry if you was expecting this thread to yield fruit for your cause.

Where is anyone calling for outrage?

Sad to see yet again the usual rubbish from the usual suspects.

IT Troll · 9 Mar 2020 at 14:46

Scougar said:
Intel-Funded Study Finds AMD Processors Including All Ryzen Chips Vulnerable To Side-Channel Security Flaw

Great click-bait headline. Here is the text from the story.

The paper states "additional funding was provided by generous gifts from Intel," so let's start there.

The disclosure appears in the Acknowledgement section of the paper, and after that whole CTS Labs controversy two years ago, it's understandable why some people might be suspicious. Daniel Gruss, an assistant professor in the Secure Systems group at the University who co-authored the paper, offered up some clarification on the matter on Twitter.

"You will find this in almost all of my papers, finding flaws in various processors and other things. Intel funds some of my students. If one of these students co-authors a paper, we acknowledge the gift of course," Gruss wrote.

He also noted half-jokingly that he could have "just dropped that PhD student off the paper instead," further noting that his "funding sources do not restrict my academic freedom and independence," otherwise he "couldn't accept that funding."

Intel's funding is interesting, and at the same time, not sufficient reason alone to dismiss the findings, especially if things are as Gruss explains.

So a single student received a funding gift from Intel. It is quite standard practice for large companies to offer bursary schemes to research students. They acknowledged it in the paper as full disclosure. This is the same research group that discovered Spectre and Meltdown, so is just building on that previous work.

gpuerrilla · 9 Mar 2020 at 14:47

* Pop's head into thread before reading some childish mud slinging banter which is not focusing on the vulnerability - but falling to weird brand loyalty tactics - as per CPU thread behaviour *

Scougar · 9 Mar 2020 at 17:07

Definitely not dismissing the issue..I literally said there IS an issue. Just getting tired of AMD/Nvidia/Intel of trying to undermine each other.

I will say yes, I did get taken in by the clickbait title. I can admit it.

In this particular case, the impact itself of this."bug" is minor to say the least.

gpuerrilla · 9 Mar 2020 at 22:08

It just makes me wonder for say the last 5 years or more, if intel didnt use the shortcuts to get the speed bragging rights what % slower would the chips have been at the time if you accumulate all these flaws/holes/microcode whatever?

b00merang69 · 9 Mar 2020 at 22:21

Well I am on my current hardware till 2022, longest ever main board + CPU (Rog Z87+4970k), and doubt I will need/want a Nvidia 3000 series GPU (did not want 2000) as I have a major backlog of games to play and a Titan Xp is fine for 1440p.

I have upgraded to all internal SSD's + Ext Mech Backup and PSU, latest BT/WIFI etc.

Hopefully by then things are matured including some kind of better monitor than LCD crap esp. the poor QA we get today.

Scougar · 10 Mar 2020 at 00:36

@Th0nt I did wonder the same thing about it. I think that AMD would have taken the same road though. Thoughts?

@b00merang69 I am thinking that when the next version of Zen releases, I may feel pressured to upgrade my CPU again, and maybe even GPU as it seems there might be a leap coming in performance for both CPU and GPU.

Hopefully all vendors will have better security in place.

gronf · 10 Mar 2020 at 02:17

AMD and Intel are scummy companies that I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them. I'll probably upgrade after DDR5, PCIE5.0, etc and I'll go with whatever is best for my price range - that'll give plenty of time for my self-righteous hypocrisy here to fade.

Sargatanas2511 · 10 Mar 2020 at 09:26

viathinair said:
AMD and Intel are scummy companies that I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them. I'll probably upgrade after DDR5, PCIE5.0, etc and I'll go with whatever is best for my price range - that'll give plenty of time for my self-righteous hypocrisy here to fade.

I wouldn't personally put AMD quite on the level of Intel but honestly I don't know why anyone would 'trust' a company out to make money. I have my experiences which helps favour, like if I am looking for storage I usually look at Western Digital because not a single one of their drives (out of 20+) have ever died on me or caused issues, but if they started messing up I would go elsewhere.

Ice Tea · 10 Mar 2020 at 10:45

Don't know if it's already been mentioned but even if AMD had the same amount of issues at least they don't keep forcing people to upgrade their Motherboards at the same rate as Intel.

gpuerrilla · 10 Mar 2020 at 11:44

Scougar said:
@Th0nt I did wonder the same thing about it. I think that AMD would have taken the same road though. Thoughts?

Yeah AMD will be in a similar boat as they have the same underlying architecture. There will be bugs from all hardware as its there to target.

What is interesting is that the volume is showing in many of intel products, and like I said should all the 'fixes' and tweaks be implemented, I wonder if a cpu from generations ago would indeed be now 25% slower to get it secure.

The other side of the coin though is are desktop users going to be vulnerable if you have to be exploiting at the machine with more or less direct access, thus most of the flaws dont need plugging as its not really going to effect the security?

Scougar · 10 Mar 2020 at 13:14

I'd be interested in seeing those pre and post mitigation updates charts for sure.

Rroff · 10 Mar 2020 at 17:17

Th0nt said:
Yeah AMD will be in a similar boat as they have the same underlying architecture. There will be bugs from all hardware as its there to target.

What is interesting is that the volume is showing in many of intel products, and like I said should all the 'fixes' and tweaks be implemented, I wonder if a cpu from generations ago would indeed be now 25% slower to get it secure.

The other side of the coin though is are desktop users going to be vulnerable if you have to be exploiting at the machine with more or less direct access, thus most of the flaws dont need plugging as its not really going to effect the security?

If you apply all mitigations including the software/Windows patches and some of the firmware updates designed to reduce the performance impact, etc. then the performance penalty will vary a lot depending on task there isn't really a set "25% slow down" some things performance isn't impacted at all other things there is a small to moderate hit. Personally I've only used a small number of updates to protect my external exposure and the performance impact is mostly so close to 0% at worst it makes no difference - talking within error margin differences - there was one thing with ~3% reduction but I can't even remember what that was.

Scougar · 10 Mar 2020 at 18:50

I mean heck... DDR4 was just discovered as having the 'Row Hammer' (I think that was the name) problem, which makes bit flipping possible and able to get to data inside the memory modules. (thought to have been fixed with the move from ddr3 to ddr4).

We really are coming to a time where chips are going to be locked down tight, or people are going to get burned.