13 vulnerabilities found in amd ryzen processors

Intel has been in the eye of the hurricane for Specter and Meltdown vulnerabilities, which especially affect its processors. When it seemed that AMD was getting rid of most of the problems, no fewer than 13 vulnerabilities have been discovered in all of its Ryzen processors based on the Zen architecture.

AMD Ryzen is full of security holes

These 13 vulnerabilities are grouped into four classes and affect all Ryzen, Ryzen Threadripper and EPYC processors. The four classes in question are Ryzenfall, Masterkey, Fallout, and Chimera. All these security problems have been discovered by security researchers CTS-Labs in Israel, the information has been made public so that AMD will have no choice but to make an official statement over the next few days.

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These discovered vulnerabilities allow malware to survive reboots and reinstalls of the operating system, remaining undetectable in most security solutions. Some of these vulnerabilities completely ignore fundamental security principles, raising issues related to security practices, auditing, and quality control at AMD.

As with the Specter and Meltdown cases, these vulnerabilities would be at the silicon level, so their removal should not be possible in current processors, they would also be present in the new second-generation Ryzen models, since the Zen architecture continues being the same since no modifications have been made beyond a new memory controller and some minor adjustments.

Vega's graphical architecture also uses an implementation of the Secure Processor, so it is highly likely that Vega will be affected in a similar way to Zen-based processors. An attacker could infect the GPU and then use DMA to access the rest of the system. through the discovered vulnerabilities.

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