anyone with that access can do a lot of damage anyway.
it’s just that there’s no remediation once the flaw has been exploited.
One of these things is not like the other.
Comment on Almost unfixable “Sinkclose” bug affects hundreds of millions of AMD chips
Telorand@reddthat.com 3 months ago
As pointed out elsewhere, the attack requires kernel-level access, and anyone with that access can do a lot of damage anyway.
And the flaw can be fixed (there’s a fix out), it’s just that there’s no remediation once the flaw has been exploited.
mox@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Yeah, turning an exploit into one that survives a fresh install is a huge deal.
FierySpectre@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It’s always been a thing that the only way to completely be safe after malware is yeeting the old system and getting a new one…
And even then there have been actively exploited issues where the system gets re-infected when reloading the data from a backup. (My memory is a bit rusty on that one, but it was just data being restored, nothing that should install anything)
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
There has been a small element of risk, but it’s low enough that this meaningfully increases it.
Telorand@reddthat.com 3 months ago
They’re intrinsically linked, in fact. If you have kernel access, you can do any number of things, including but not limited to persistent rootkits. I agree that this bug is one step further, since it affects the processor itself, but if somebody has ring 0 access that shouldn’t, you already have problems.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 3 months ago
Read it again, in context. What they said is perfectly valid.
mox@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
No, it is misleading. An exploit with no remediation is not remotely comparable to any other root exploit, which can be fixed with a simple OS reinstall.
sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
It also means no AMD server could be resold because there is no way to know if it was previously infected