That’s not what I was referring to. I was referring to the act of “adding vulnerabilities”. Surely they aren’t doing that on purpose. And surely they would add fixes for it if it was economically viable? It’s a matter of goodwill and reputation, right?
I don’t know, I just don’t think it’s AMD’s business model to “screw over” their customers. I just don’t.
What I mean by that is that they will take a huge disservice to their customers over a slight financial inconvenience (packaging and validating an existing fix for different CPU series with the same architecture).
I don’t classify fixing critical vulnerabilities from products as recent as the last decade as “goodwill”, that’s just what I’d expect to receive as a customer: a working product with no known vulnerabilities left open. I could’ve bought a Ryzen 3000 CPU (maybe as part of cheap office PCs or whatever) a few days ago, only to now know they have this severe vulnerability with the label WONTFIX on it. And even if I bought it 5 years ago: a fix exists, port it over!
I know some people say it’s not that critical of a bug because an attacker needs kernel access, but it’s a convenient part of a vulnerability chain for an attacker that once exploited is almost impossible to detect and remove.
Maybe they’ll reverse course with enough blowback, they did that once with ryzen already, don’t remember which Gen it was but it wasn’t going to be backwards compatible with certain type of mobos, but then they released it anyway and some mobo manufacturers did provide bios updates to support it.
Similarish situation could happen here, the biggest hangup I’d think is that the 3000 series is nearly 5 years old, and getting mobo manufacturers on board for that could be difficult.
What I meant was exactly that, which you corroborated as correct. You’d first have to already compromise these systems, in order to be able to exploit this vulnerability. That’s as I understood it. It’s that correct?
Gosh, it’s not easy getting my point across here today, I’m sorry.
All I’m saying is that I don’t think AMD is doing this to us, on purpose. I think it’s just happened, and they’re not handling it very well, even though it’s somewhat understandable. At least to me. 🤷♂️
But then again, I have no reason to be attacked or have my system compromised, so my situation is better than others’, perhaps.
No, but those vulnerabilities where there when you bought it.
Would a car have a defect that was shown 5 years later, then the manufacturer would have to recall it or offer a repair program and or money in exchange.
Since everything is proprietary you cannot even fix things like this by yourself. The manufacturer needs to be held liable.
Would a car have a defect that was shown 5 years later, then the manufacturer would have to recall it or offer a repair program and or money in exchange.
I mean… A car is different, depending on the defect. It’s like “this window only breaks if you’ve already crashed the car”. (The defect only causes a vulnerability if the system is already compromised AFAICT.) And 5 years is much, much younger for a car compared to a CPU, but that’s not the important bit, I know.
But I agree with you all, I am not saying it shouldn’t be fixed, I was just saying I don’t think AMD is looking to screw over their customers on purpose. That’s all.
“this window only breaks if you’ve already crashed the car”
No, it’s usually more like “this thing will break and cause a car crash” or “this thing will murder everyone in the vehicle if you crash”. And companies still will not fix it. Look at the Ford Pinto, executives very literally wrote off people’s deaths as a cost of doing business, when they’d turn into fireballs during even low speed rear-end collisions. Potentially burning down the car that hit them too.
Edit: I mean, just look at the Takata airbag recall. 100 million airbags from 20 different carmakers recalled because they wouldn’t activate during a crash.
When I said “It’s like”, I meant it as a simile to what’s going on with AMD right now. Not with what’s actually going on with car companies. Car companies are a whole different topic and discussion, of which I know nothing.
Sorry, I reread it and I understand now that you were referencing the AMD chip in a comparison. I guess I still would compare it most to the Takata airbag situation. You’re right that nothing happens on it’s own, but once you’ve “crashed the car” then it kind of is a lot like an airbag not going off. It infects your computer on a hardware level, and any future OS running off that motherboard is potentially vulnerable in a way that’s impossible to tell.
But the airbag situation is different. The airbag vulnerability is something broken which already doesn’t work on the car. It’s broken before and after the crash.
But as I understood it, this vulnerability is only exploitable after the system has been compromised in some other way, first. So your system would have to first be compromised, then this vulnerability is exploitable. That’s like saying “your car radio will not function in this car, but only after the engine breaks.” It’s like 🤷♂️ OK, seems reasonable.
But the really bad thing IMO is that this vulnerability can cause permanent damage once exploited (?). That is super, super bad.
Except that doesn’t at all explain the wider recall of 100 million units. Not every single one of those airbags were faulty. First of all, how could we know? Testing an airbag is a potentially dangerous thing to do, let alone on an enormous scale that would require under-qualified persons to run the tests. Secondly, it’s not a 100% failure rate. If it were, it would have been picked up far sooner than it would take to sell 100 million units. If it happened just as severely no matter the unit’s age, it would have been picked up during crash-testing. What actually happened was an analysis of statistical averages that showed a far higher rate of failure than there should have been.
The similarities to me come from a comparison to Schrödinger’s cat. In the airbag example, you don’t know if the unit in front of you is going yo fail until you “open the box” by crashing. With the AMD vulnerability, you don’t know if ur motherboard has been infected by any virus/worm/etc until a “crash” or other signs of suspicious behaviour.
In both cases, the solution to the vulnerability removes that uncertainty, allowing you to use the product to it’s original full extent.
Look at it this way, imagine if this vulnerability existed in the ECU/BCU of a self-driving capable car. At any point someone could bury a piece of code so deeply you can’t ever be sure it’s gone. Would you want to drive that car?
The cost isn’t that high. They’re already doing it for a bunch of parallel systems.
In a just world they’d be legally required to provide the fixes, or fully refund the entire platform cost. It’s not remotely ethical to allow this to exist unpatched anywhere, regardless of support life.
deleted by creator
That’s not what I was referring to. I was referring to the act of “adding vulnerabilities”. Surely they aren’t doing that on purpose. And surely they would add fixes for it if it was economically viable? It’s a matter of goodwill and reputation, right?
I don’t know, I just don’t think it’s AMD’s business model to “screw over” their customers. I just don’t.
What I mean by that is that they will take a huge disservice to their customers over a slight financial inconvenience (packaging and validating an existing fix for different CPU series with the same architecture).
I don’t classify fixing critical vulnerabilities from products as recent as the last decade as “goodwill”, that’s just what I’d expect to receive as a customer: a working product with no known vulnerabilities left open. I could’ve bought a Ryzen 3000 CPU (maybe as part of cheap office PCs or whatever) a few days ago, only to now know they have this severe vulnerability with the label WONTFIX on it. And even if I bought it 5 years ago: a fix exists, port it over!
I know some people say it’s not that critical of a bug because an attacker needs kernel access, but it’s a convenient part of a vulnerability chain for an attacker that once exploited is almost impossible to detect and remove.
Maybe they’ll reverse course with enough blowback, they did that once with ryzen already, don’t remember which Gen it was but it wasn’t going to be backwards compatible with certain type of mobos, but then they released it anyway and some mobo manufacturers did provide bios updates to support it.
Similarish situation could happen here, the biggest hangup I’d think is that the 3000 series is nearly 5 years old, and getting mobo manufacturers on board for that could be difficult.
Well, you feel how you feel, and you choose the products you want after this. Good luck to you! 👍
Edit: So many down votes for wishing someone good luck. The hive mind is odd sometimes.
deleted by creator
I’m guessing it’s a balance between old products, effort, severity, etc. As we’ve learned, this is only an issue for an already infected system. 🤷♂️
deleted by creator
Just because a store is still selling their stock doesn’t mean AND is still making them and selling them.
Ah, that changes things. Not great. But still,
what I meant was that apparently only compromised systems are vulnerable to this defect.
deleted by creator
What I meant was exactly that, which you corroborated as correct. You’d first have to already compromise these systems, in order to be able to exploit this vulnerability. That’s as I understood it. It’s that correct?
Gosh, it’s not easy getting my point across here today, I’m sorry.
All I’m saying is that I don’t think AMD is doing this to us, on purpose. I think it’s just happened, and they’re not handling it very well, even though it’s somewhat understandable. At least to me. 🤷♂️
But then again, I have no reason to be attacked or have my system compromised, so my situation is better than others’, perhaps.
deleted by creator
No, but those vulnerabilities where there when you bought it.
Would a car have a defect that was shown 5 years later, then the manufacturer would have to recall it or offer a repair program and or money in exchange.
Since everything is proprietary you cannot even fix things like this by yourself. The manufacturer needs to be held liable.
I mean… A car is different, depending on the defect. It’s like “this window only breaks if you’ve already crashed the car”. (The defect only causes a vulnerability if the system is already compromised AFAICT.) And 5 years is much, much younger for a car compared to a CPU, but that’s not the important bit, I know.
But I agree with you all, I am not saying it shouldn’t be fixed, I was just saying I don’t think AMD is looking to screw over their customers on purpose. That’s all.
No, it’s usually more like “this thing will break and cause a car crash” or “this thing will murder everyone in the vehicle if you crash”. And companies still will not fix it. Look at the Ford Pinto, executives very literally wrote off people’s deaths as a cost of doing business, when they’d turn into fireballs during even low speed rear-end collisions. Potentially burning down the car that hit them too.
Edit: I mean, just look at the Takata airbag recall. 100 million airbags from 20 different carmakers recalled because they wouldn’t activate during a crash.
When I said “It’s like”, I meant it as a simile to what’s going on with AMD right now. Not with what’s actually going on with car companies. Car companies are a whole different topic and discussion, of which I know nothing.
Sorry, I reread it and I understand now that you were referencing the AMD chip in a comparison. I guess I still would compare it most to the Takata airbag situation. You’re right that nothing happens on it’s own, but once you’ve “crashed the car” then it kind of is a lot like an airbag not going off. It infects your computer on a hardware level, and any future OS running off that motherboard is potentially vulnerable in a way that’s impossible to tell.
But the airbag situation is different. The airbag vulnerability is something broken which already doesn’t work on the car. It’s broken before and after the crash.
But as I understood it, this vulnerability is only exploitable after the system has been compromised in some other way, first. So your system would have to first be compromised, then this vulnerability is exploitable. That’s like saying “your car radio will not function in this car, but only after the engine breaks.” It’s like 🤷♂️ OK, seems reasonable.
But the really bad thing IMO is that this vulnerability can cause permanent damage once exploited (?). That is super, super bad.
Except that doesn’t at all explain the wider recall of 100 million units. Not every single one of those airbags were faulty. First of all, how could we know? Testing an airbag is a potentially dangerous thing to do, let alone on an enormous scale that would require under-qualified persons to run the tests. Secondly, it’s not a 100% failure rate. If it were, it would have been picked up far sooner than it would take to sell 100 million units. If it happened just as severely no matter the unit’s age, it would have been picked up during crash-testing. What actually happened was an analysis of statistical averages that showed a far higher rate of failure than there should have been.
The similarities to me come from a comparison to Schrödinger’s cat. In the airbag example, you don’t know if the unit in front of you is going yo fail until you “open the box” by crashing. With the AMD vulnerability, you don’t know if ur motherboard has been infected by any virus/worm/etc until a “crash” or other signs of suspicious behaviour.
In both cases, the solution to the vulnerability removes that uncertainty, allowing you to use the product to it’s original full extent.
Look at it this way, imagine if this vulnerability existed in the ECU/BCU of a self-driving capable car. At any point someone could bury a piece of code so deeply you can’t ever be sure it’s gone. Would you want to drive that car?
The cost isn’t that high. They’re already doing it for a bunch of parallel systems.
In a just world they’d be legally required to provide the fixes, or fully refund the entire platform cost. It’s not remotely ethical to allow this to exist unpatched anywhere, regardless of support life.
I agree. 👌