Numerous vulnerabilities in AMD processors [LWN.net]

Numerous vulnerabilities in AMD processors

Posted Mar 14, 2018 0:42 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Numerous vulnerabilities in AMD processors by rahvin
Parent article: Numerous vulnerabilities in AMD processors

There are a *lot* of tech companies in Israel. You might as well worry that some security companies are on the US west coast so therefore anything coming from them *obviously* must be a hit job from (insert name of random big tech company here).

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Numerous vulnerabilities in AMD processors

Posted Mar 16, 2018 0:32 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

Focusing on the statement about Israel is foolish. I brought it up because unlike Tech in General Intel only has a handful of offices engaged in x86 processor design and outside their main office Israel houses the second largest site for this design. But it's not this factor alone.

The company is 6 months old, according to the information out there they provide vulnerability testing for "clients". The claimed AMD can't fix these vulnerabilities. And there is a dozen other things about this that are just plain suspicious not to mention how underwhelming the "vulnerabilities" are. They didn't disclose the vulnerabilities to AMD, but they sent full code and details to Microsoft, HP, DELL and other OEM's. (AMD that I'm aware of still doesn't have the full details). Take a look at the "vulnerability" website amdflaws.com and tell me that doesn't look like someone spent a week and a bunch of money developing that site and overplaying how bad the vulnerabilities are. And the kicker is CTS paid an outside company $26,000 to validate their findings. How on earth can a company founded 6 months ago with 6 employees afford something like that without a client covering an expense like that?

Anandtech did a interview with CTS (the company behind the release) :
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12536/our-interesting-call...

Tech Crunch lays out some of the things that are very suspicious about this:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/13/security-researchers-fi...

This screams paid hit job to me, and given Intel has done stuff like this in the past and AMD appears to be doing quite well with both Ryzen and Epyc sales and market uptakes. Given what Meltdown did to the PC marketplace it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Intel hired some people and setup a shell company to do a hit piece on this. This doesn't even cover the huge purchase of put options that occured a few days before and the stock advisor in Germany that declared AMD was going bankrupt.

Numerous vulnerabilities in AMD processors

Posted Mar 16, 2018 5:42 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Hey, considering the state of quality and security in the industry, whatever has the tiniest chance of finally scaring a bit clueless (program) managers telling you to "pull in the schedule"and to "ship it" is a Good Thing. I hope consumers will trust computers less and less which should create a gap to fill with decent engineering at last.

The stock market doesn't need that story to be a joke in the first place, this would be at worst a drop in the ocean.

Nice to see some people still have ideals about big business though :-)