> Final update: A couple of days before the embargo ended (and after I wrote the majority of this blog post), AMD told me what their patch for this vulnerability is [...] Although it is true that they now fully use HTTPS, the claim about signature verification is untrue; they only perform a CRC-32 check on the downloaded executable, which is not cryptographically secure.<p>So solves the MITM, but massive infection is still trivial if someone compromises the webserver.
> someone compromises the webserver<p>Sure, but that's true for 99% of things. Unless you establish trust outside of the normal distribution channel how would you protect against this? What is your proposed channel that is not bootstrapped from HTTPS PKI?
AMD (and Intel and everyone else) processors already have an HSM inside for confidential computing so use that? I would hope the HSM isn't as badly implemented as this update mechanism, but then again ...
AMD Software Engineers giving AMD Stupid Gaming Accessory Software Engineers access to a signing system backed by PSP seems like a much worse outcome than trusting HTTPS, really. Like, there are definitely intelligent and secure ways to do this, but this one in particular is overkill with a huge blast radius when it is (invariably) done incorrectly.
Those have been broken again and again. Even if not, how do you distribute the public keys for it, how do you bootstrap that trust?
There was a time when <i>RDRAND</i> on Zen gave all zeroes, or something, so eh...<p>I'm happy enough with TLS introduced: knowing the server I'm reaching for updates <i>is</i> actually <i>'amd.com'.</i> Signatures would be nice, sure, but I wouldn't consider them nearly as critical or useful <i>until now</i>. Before we get too caught up in signatures, however, I'd like to see their new/improved updater actually take precedence.<p>As things stand, I'm not sure key rotation would go well... the <i>updater</i> doesn't mind itself, apparently.
What? <i>The bootstrapping happened already!</i> The official and correct AMD software <i>already</i> running on the computers. Preventing a human from falling for an impostor-website with malicious Download Now links is a separate problem.<p>The basics are straightforward: It'd be better if the current installation contains one (or more) public keys, and anything it downloads must validate as being signed by a corresponding private key. You don't need to do fancy things like global certs, discoverable keys, or revocation lists.<p>If <i>today's</i> installation doesn't have those checks and relies solely on HTTPS... well, that's unfortunate, but it's not like it poses a tricky dilemma! You simply use today's not-so-secure mechanism to install the new code which has more-secure behavior, and it closes the attacker's window of (easier) opportunity.
> The current installation shall already contain one (or more) public keys that it trusts for updates<p>The current installation was fetched via HTTPS, right? Either by you or in the factory.<p>Just saying the "bootstrapping already happened" does not make it not happen. It still needs to bootstrap trust from <i>somewhere</i>
I still can't figure out what problem you believe needs-fixing or what process you think needs to be explained. My most-charitable guesses are:<p>A. You're asking what should be done if the manufacturer's auto-update server has <i>already</i> been completely compromised by hackers and remains compromised.<p>B. [Implicitly rejected in last coment] You're asking how anybody can guarantee the <i>very first</i> install can be trusted even if someone has compromised drivers.amd.com .<p>C. You're asking if the auto-update process can somehow trick a compromised daemon into overwriting itself with a legit copy.<p>Those are all interesting to contemplate, but they are at best "out of scope".
[Followup] To over-communicate in the hope that it somehow resolves things, we already have this chain of trust:<p>1. Axiom: We trust the current daemon and OS. We must assume this, because otherwise it's an entirely separate problem and this whole discussion of an auto-update channel is irrelevant.<p>2. Axiom: We trust the owner. Tampering with the local auto-update process is not part of our threat-model, because a user who <i>can</i> do that doesn't <i>need</i> to.<p>3. The daemon is already coded to trust a replacement/successor installer if it meets certain criteria, which are:<p>3a. It comes from a trusted domain name it already knows should be owned by the same developer/company.<p>3b. The remote end is authenticated to "be" that domain via certificates from the (trusted) OS.<p>3c. The content is protected from tampering due, becauese we trust that TLS/SSL encrypts it.<p>That all already exists, it does not need to be torn down or rebooted. The proposal here is to simply to <i>harden</i> it with a new requirement in the next version:<p>3d. The next install must be signed by a trusted key-pair that was shipped with the current install.<p>This improves trust because it means an attacker would also need to compromise keys held in a release pipeline, which is much easier to secure than a CDN/webserver.
Sure, but the OEM is the definition of a ‘trusted environment’. They literally are assembling the equipment, if you can’t trust that, nothing else can be trusted from that point on anyway.
> someone
what are the chances of them caring so little, but implementing a dedicated signing server, HSM,etc..? even if they sign it, it will probably be done on the same web server.
It's ridiculous to consider MITM attacks out of scope for taking over your computer. Also, there are probably ways to exploit this without a true MITM like DNS cache poisoning. But it's best to just assume the whole internet is MITMed.
It's not out of scope "for taking over your computer". It's out of scope for the specific goals of the bug bounty program. Bug bounties are (usually) about prioritizing internal engineering effort; they are to vulnerability remediation what market feedback is to feature/function decisions in the rest of the product.<p>Everyone's judging this by the standard of "how good a bug" this is. But that's not necessarily how a bug bounty should function. Important prior to frame this with: neither any individual bug bounty submission nor the sum of all valid submissions materially alters the security of a serious product, at least not on their own. The system they feed into (for instance: security engineers taking a validated bounty submission and then quickly auditing the entire tree for variants of the same bug) can move the dials. The bounty bugs themselves though are mostly a sideshow.<p>What's especially weird (you didn't say this, but the sentiment has popped up on all 3 threads about this story) is the idea that AMD would be trying to cover this up. Why would they care? They run a bug bounty program. They've accepted the premise that they have vulnerabilities.<p>(From earlier today, in add'n: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492908">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492908</a>).
MITM where attacker needs to install their own CA certs on the victim's device -- sure, out of scope.<p>MITM because you used http instead of https and you don't have any other verified cryptographic signature on your data -- get tae fuck, fix it pronto.
Why would anyone ever exclude true mitm?<p>Various domain registrars have been compromised over and over again (often by children!), resulting in companies like Tesla and Cloudflare getting owned.<p>The reality is that <i>any vaguely competent attacker</i> can compromise a court clerk and just compel e.g. the .com registry to hand over whatever domain they want.<p>Although I suppose the aforementioned problem has significant implications beyond dns…
Out of scope does not necessarily mean out of impact. It is merely a question of how far a company wants to be responsible for the environment their software is run in. Most of the time that answer is "not much."
Out of scope in this case means "we don't wanna pay you"
But I use a Wi-Fi password, so my phone says it's secure!
AMD's inability to make good software has been a recurring problem for decades. Many years ago I had some success with their optimising compiler, but everything else I've touched was bad. A real pity.
Yes, their software is terrible across CPUs and GPUs, and continues to be. So many trivial bugs just never fixed.<p>It has literally cost them a Trillion dollars in market cap - Nvidia's CUDA is a big reason they're so much bigger than AMD.
AMD somehow got success, but their company culture and pay is shit. They expect PHD level experience but expect pay like peanuts....
Their pay is shit. I interviewed with them 3 years ago and they offered me peanuts I rejected their offer.
The "signature verification" in the fix being CRC32 is pretty hilariously clueless.
It's technically possible (though I don't know if they actually do this) that they're not referring to a signature check in the download part, but are verifying the code signing signature of the executable downloaded. You'd only notice the CRC if you were looking at the downloaded content, but if the updater refuses to launch an executable that isn't signed by AMD's cert then they would be fine.<p>Given the way AMD has been treating this issue, I'm assuming they're just incompetent, though.
The article has a screenshot of the decompiled code showing that they're just running the downloaded executable immediately, without any additional checks on the content.
A manager somewhere made the embarrassingly wrong decision to not fix this, and they’re too egotistical to correct their mistake.<p>That’s my take.
Especially because if they had read about or studied this problem they would find tons of prior art where CRC32 was considered not secure for solving the problem. CRC32 solves a different problem -- how do you verify that the data that was received is identical to the data that was sent. It makes no guarantees about who is sending the data, which is the real problem signatures solve.
More specifically, it solves the problem of verifying that the data received was not accidentally corrupted somehow. Unlike cryptographic hashes, CRC32 does <i>not</i> do much to defend against deliberate, malicious modification. It's too easy to craft some different data that matches a given CRC32 value.
They should have done base64 encryption before the crc32. noobs
AMD didn't deny it was a vulnerability; they denied it was in the scope of the bounty program.<p>Remember that at giant tech companies, the incentive is to pay out bounties --- there are people on the vendor's team whose performance is measured in part by how <i>much</i> the program pays out.
How do we know the incentive is to pay out bounties? And how do we know that doesn't change on the whims of the management chain?<p>We don't "know" anything unless we are at that company in particular and part of the management conversations. We at best can theorize based on incentives, but that's assuming companies and people are logical, which is a large assumption. I could easily see someone in the midst of layoffs and reduction of overhead initiatives thinking that the solution is to convince everyone you do payouts, but actually minimize payouts, which you could do by creatively using scopes.
What hair is this splitting? The issue was that AMD allowed a known and serious security vulnerability to exist within their customers’ systems, for months, and acted with a lack of candor while doing so.
They wanted to keep it quiet. As if they did not mind if it was exploited by those with access to international network links.
The discussion the video references [1]<p>[1] - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906947">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906947</a>
The original post [1] now includes an update:<p><pre><code> UPDATE! Within a day of this blowing up on Hacker News, AMD reached back
out to me and said they would be looking into the matter after all.
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="https://mrbruh.com/amd2/" rel="nofollow">https://mrbruh.com/amd2/</a>
> In my frustration, I decided to punish this software<p>Love this. I am frustrated by idiot software features everywhere, but am not triggered yet to punish them. AI automation is coming close however.
Well that explains why I get that random console pop up from time to time, thanks for the insight into what's going on!
AMD's utter incompetence when it comes to the software side of things is truly, truly baffling to me. It's not like you need a mountain of developers, a team or two on the right project would do <i>wonders</i> for their market share.<p>For example: Implement the CUDA. CUDA's won, hands down, that toothpaste is solidly outside the tube. Luckily, to the outside observer CUDA is just an API, and API's aren't copyrightable. Literally nothing is stopping AMD from hiring a relatively small team of developers to make AMD GPUs CUDA-compatible.
AMD's entire software development strategy is insane. OpenCL was doing reasonably well, and then AMD have just fully dropped support for some reason. For the - albeit not huge - but actual cross platform API that people were using to develop for their GPUs. For a while, a few cross platform tools had OpenCL backends, but nobody has been able to get AMD to fix any of the damn bugs. In my testing, bug latency for even the most trivial but important bugfixes is often 4+ years, which is utterly mad. Some parts of their compute stack is so broken its clear that nobody has ever used it. There are exploitable privilege escalation vulnerabilities caused by threaded race conditions that are wontfix<p>They could support OpenCL 3.0. Nvidia do. AMD just chooses not to, even though they're the ones that desperately needs to support it <i>most</i><p>Instead, we got ROCm which has been a disaster from start to end. It barely supports windows or consumer GPUs, for some reason. Its a buggy mess, for some reason. HIP/ROCm has worse performance than OpenCL, because they downgraded their compiler and stopped extracting read/write information on variables leading to a massive loss of parallelism and utilisation on their GPUs.. for some reason. Why? What are they doing? How is this so rubbish?<p>Literally ALL of this is WONTFIX, and I don't have a clue why. I've filed bugs, was part of their vanguard supporter program, have tried to reach out to AMD people to (gently) explain why good support is important. Or even just figure out what technology they're even intending to support for GPU development. Is ROCm deprecated? What should we be using on windows for GPU compute on consumer hardware AMD? For the love of god amd I want to make you money<p>As of 2026, the best cross platform cross vendor API for doing GPU compute is.. drumroll.. OpenCL 1.2. Vulkan is getting there, but its still missing a bunch of stuff. And this is literally AMDs direct fault at this point
likewise. i'm bewildered throughout the years.<p>my suspicion is that it is the company culture: the hardware engineers are the real engineers. software is a triviality left for the lesser minds. the consequence is they mess up every product... everything they do needs software.
The argument I have read here on HN, is that CUDA is made for NVidia hardware, and the AMD hardware is not the best fit.<p>Essentially it forces AMD to play by NVidias rules, exactly like how they were forced to follow Intel rules. (Ignore for a second that the API / ISA boundary is different.)<p>But despite that, I also believe AMD would be better off just implementing CUDA.
They did, apparently, at one point pay someone to build that glue, and then threw it out and wouldn't let the author release it so he's been reimplementing it out of...spite? Burning desire? Unclear. [1]<p>I can't imagine the logic involved in "this is implemented, let's toss it in the dumpster" for that.<p>[1] - <a href="https://vosen.github.io/ZLUDA/blog/zludas-third-life/" rel="nofollow">https://vosen.github.io/ZLUDA/blog/zludas-third-life/</a>
HIP tries to be like this, almost API compatible with CUDA such that you just need to do find and replace. I think they even had a script to do this for you.<p>But the issue remains that the actual support and debugging tools remain so atrocious that it doesn't help to combat the CUDA monopoly. They've further burned a lot of trust by never really delivering on their promises to do better unless you're a customer large enough to get personalized attention from their engineers.<p>This ends up being a double whammy because not only are you pushing away smaller businesses, you're also pushing away single developers that go on to influence purchasing/development decisions.
HIP was such a self-own and clear demonstration of AMD software capabilities... well, the lack of software capabilities. HIP was hard-coded for one GPU architecture. CUDA did it right, it has a intermediate virtual assembly PTX and driver compiles it to whatever actual instruction set card actually uses.<p>Imagine a meeting where they signed off on that. So each developer will have to provide a different binary for each of our architectures? Yep. And once we release the new architecture, developer will have to recompile his program for the new architecture? Yep. Sounds good to me.
Yes, that was in part why they've had such a terrible history with GPU support.<p>They lost me as a customer when they rushed dropping support for the Radeon VII because of the need to ship binaries for every ISA, and didn't deliver proper 5700XT support until it was outdated.
> 124 days to get AMD to add an s to a couple of HTTP URLs!<p>I disagree that they should only add HTTPS and call it done. They should also add some kind of signing check before running the payload.<p>If anything I'd say HTTPS is optional if they do that part.
AMD, just pay the man.<p>You want this stuff disclosed to you.
previously <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906947">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906947</a>
Actual write-up rather than overwrought YouTube drama: <a href="https://mrbruh.com/amd2/" rel="nofollow">https://mrbruh.com/amd2/</a><p>A non-default-installation set of AMD tools (Ryzen Master and probably others) had an auto-updater which used HTTP instead of HTTPS. It's clear this is a feature they'd basically forgotten about; it even pointed to an ATI domain. A third-party bug bounty company rejected it because MITM was out of scope. AMD are incompetent at making software (news at 11), kept asking for extensions, and took an incredible amount of time to deal with it. Eventually they removed this updater entirely and replaced it with one in the app (rather than the installer) that uses HTTPS + a CRC32 (for some reason). The initial vuln was very stupid and should have been fixed faster. As for the current system, if you're mad about HTTPS-protected auto-updaters (which is valid), you've probably got a lot of them to go to war against.
> If you are an AMD user...<p>Don't bother to use Windows?
There's two requests involved for the auto updater, one to grab the XML file, and one to grab the driver file over plain http.<p>If the autoupdater can't handle the redirection when grabbing the XML file, then it's a case of accidental safety by mistake that would prevent grabbing the plain http file.
Thank you for looking into this, I also have the annoying pop-up and have been suspicious of it…
Congratulations, you found the government backdoor!
Jesus after reading this I'm wondering if I want to switch my AMD Framework 13 Pro order to Intel, but the IME runs on Java if memory serves and it's not like they'll be any more secure.<p>I just hope we can get Libreboot working with Framework sometime.
Multi billion dollar company, by the way.
Let this lesson be learned: "In my frustration, I decided to punish this software by decompiling it to figure out how it worked,"<p>Note to self: Never piss off a programmer, while he is gaming. To quote: "You're gonna die for that." -Duke Nukem.
I think we can all agree that MiTM is a valid attack vector and this should have paid out the bounty. AMD won't do it, but perhaps we can crowdsource it - the dude deserves it. Join me in doing this: <a href="https://ko-fi.com/mrbruhh" rel="nofollow">https://ko-fi.com/mrbruhh</a> (identical link to the one in the write up, feel free to verify).<p>I started it with $100 - <a href="https://ko-fi.com/transactions/03df753c-09b0-4972-8e53-adf060985f17/thank-you" rel="nofollow">https://ko-fi.com/transactions/03df753c-09b0-4972-8e53-adf06...</a>
AMD software is often utter trash.<p>I am a diehard fanboy of their GPUs, and have been since they were still ATI but I had to finally purchase an nvidia GPU because of how bad AMDs software quality is.<p>My powerful 5700XT spent two years basically broken, because the default, driver provided fan curve locked the fan at 27%. For two years, I couldn't figure out why my GPU constantly crashed, because it was overheating, because the default fan curve <i>prevented the GPU from keeping itself cool</i> and it would eventually just give up.<p>That diagnoses was complicated by the fact that AMD GPUs just resetting is very common. There's a watchdog timer in Windows that resets parts of the GPU stack because Microsoft is traumatized by 60% of Windows Vista BSODs being caused by bad nvidia drivers. Apparently sometimes if you increase this watchdog timer, the GPU eventually finishes whatever was giving it trouble.<p>But I still love AMD, and the ryzen line is a great value in the mid range. So I bought another AMD CPU and am very happy with it. But it somehow included software and this specific auto updater utility. Which I don't need, since I don't want to update the drivers for a GPU that I shouldn't be using (maybe except some video encoding lift, but my GPU can do that too). But I could not figure out a way to kill or prevent this stupid little autoupdater utility which always <i>steals focus</i>, for no reason at all. It shouldn't even be popping up a CLI! Windows task scheduling is incredible and would do this without a problem, and give you all the infrastructure to notice this was happening!
There is something wrong with the internal fan curve on my old rx580 as well. I ended up writing a controller to manually set the fan speed via the /sys interface.<p>I still need to figure out why the internal curve is not working, but have not gotten around to it because I like my controller so much. The novel bit is that as I was writing it I had an epiphany "Why a curve? What we really want is to close the loop. Set an ideal temperature and figure out the fan speed to maintain it" So my controller has a cute little PID loop to do just that. realistically it never works as I imagined. At idle the temp is lower then the set point at the slowest fan speed and at load the full speed fan keeps it ~ 10C higher than the set point(perhaps this means my set point should be higher?). but sometimes I get that goldilocks midrange load and it works great.
Drivers got better after ATI merged/got bought by AMD, but ATI has a loooooong legacy of terrible drivers in Windows.<p>The funny thing is, in Linux, the drivers are pretty great as far as I can tell. It's not like there aren't bugs, probably, but mostly everything "just works". You can't depend on FSR in Linux, for example - Doom Eternal just goes blank if you turn it on. I can live without it, though, and everything else seems fine, including performance.<p>Nvidia linux drivers make me quite upset - they're fine once you finally get them working, but you approach Nvidia driver updates with extreme caution in Linux
Seems like white hat work is pretty fruitless nowadays. Disappointing.
Gaslighting does not mean lying.
Yeah, it's annoying. But it's been captured by popular culture as meaning a blatant lie - one where the liar knows the truth is or was available/obvious. A "don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining" lie.<p>Or, alternatively, and especially in gender relations, any lie intended to manipulate or demean another person. As opposed to lying to protect yourself, to swindle somebody, or some other reason. This is closer to the original idea, but still not there.
Such a bug could have been exploited by certain big state actors.<p>Those that have access to international network links.<p>Those that have the ability to generate new firmware that simply passes the CRC32 checksum.