Researchers warn that a bug in AMD’s chips would allow attackers to root into some of the most privileged portions of a computer—and that it has persisted in the company’s processors for decades.
It means it’s what we in the trade call “a nothingburger”. On Windows you need to explicitly install a malicious driver (which in turn requires to you to disable signature verification), on Linux you’d have to load a malicious kernel module (which requires pasting commands as root, and it would probably be proprietary since it has malware to hide and as every nvidia user knows, proprietary kernel modules break with kernel updates)
The more likely scenario is an attacker using another vulnerability, either in the OS itself or in a vendor-supplied component like a driver or anti-cheat module, to gain a foothold for this one. Chaining exploits is a very common technique. (What “trade” are you in, exactly?)
Apply the mitigations when they become available for your hardware, folks.
This article should say, with this one easy hack you can control an AMD users PC, all you gotta do is break into their home at 10pm right before they log off from browsing reddit and bam access.
It means that a malicious actor would already need to have hacked your computer quite deeply through some other vulnerability (or social engineering) before they could take advantage of this one. But I don’t agree with another commenter here that this is a “nothingburger”: this vulnerability enables such a hacker to leave undetectable malware that you just can’t remove from the computer even if you replace everything but the motherboard. That’s significant, particularly for anyone who might be a target of cyber-espionage.
What does that mean to the rest of us?
It means it’s what we in the trade call “a nothingburger”. On Windows you need to explicitly install a malicious driver (which in turn requires to you to disable signature verification), on Linux you’d have to load a malicious kernel module (which requires pasting commands as root, and it would probably be proprietary since it has malware to hide and as every nvidia user knows, proprietary kernel modules break with kernel updates)
So install a multiplayer game, it has kernel level anticheat that opens a bunch of security holes, game over.
Kernel level access is absolutely achievable in the real world.
Not to be contrarian, but hackers have signed malicious code with compromised Microsoft driver certificates, so it’s not out of the question that it could be snuck in without having to turn off signing.
nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel
No, it does not mean you would need to do that.
The more likely scenario is an attacker using another vulnerability, either in the OS itself or in a vendor-supplied component like a driver or anti-cheat module, to gain a foothold for this one. Chaining exploits is a very common technique. (What “trade” are you in, exactly?)
Apply the mitigations when they become available for your hardware, folks.
This article should say, with this one easy hack you can control an AMD users PC, all you gotta do is break into their home at 10pm right before they log off from browsing reddit and bam access.
Sounds like a plan!
It means that a malicious actor would already need to have hacked your computer quite deeply through some other vulnerability (or social engineering) before they could take advantage of this one. But I don’t agree with another commenter here that this is a “nothingburger”: this vulnerability enables such a hacker to leave undetectable malware that you just can’t remove from the computer even if you replace everything but the motherboard. That’s significant, particularly for anyone who might be a target of cyber-espionage.
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