this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
-8 points (43.3% liked)

Technology

34964 readers
153 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 36 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It should be noted that if a hacker is able to exploit this, they'd need a lot of access and you'd already be boned. This is no where as bad as what Intel is going through right now.

Saying that you have to "basically throw away your computer" is very misleading to say especially in a subtitle, when that exact thing is actually what is happening with Intel CPUs.

[–] 30p87 4 points 3 months ago

They say it's "Platform secure boot" by AMD. They refuse to elaborate further though, and no one knows wth that is. Except AMD themselves ofc: https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/technologies/pro-technologies.html

Platform secure boot is designed to provide protection in response to growing firmware-level remote attacks being seen across the industry. AMD Secure Boot helps continue the chain of trust from the system BIOS to the OS Bootloader.

Ah fuck it, here's the security researchers explanation: https://labs.ioactive.com/2024/02/exploring-amd-platform-secure-boot.html?m=1

[–] tomalley8342@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It's an exploit path to a UEFI bootkit, so at the very least you'd have to throw your motherboard away or find someone that can physically overwrite it through an external flash programmer or something. And the patch should be delivered through a UEFI firmware update, so if your motherboard is no longer supported you would have to buy a new one. And for laptops and embedded devices having everything soldered in, the motherboard is basically the whole computer, so I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration.

I guess it's true that if you have ring 0 access you're boned, bug if your ring 0 access gets upgraded into ring -2 access you are even more boned. They put those security boundaries in place for a reason after all.