Newly-Discovered Vulnerability Could Affect AMD CPUs Up To 9 Years Ago

The other day it was reported that a new vulnerability for Intel’s chipsets had been found, and that these vulnerabilities are essentially unpatchable due the fact it has been hardcoded into the CPU itself. For AMD users who think that they might be safe, think again because that does not appear to be the case.

According to researchers at the Graz University of Technology, they have discovered a vulnerability that affects AMD CPUs dating back to 2011, meaning that any AMD CPU that has been produced in the past 9 years could be potentially affected by this flaw if it has been exploited.

The newly-discovered vulnerabilities exploit the “way predictor” for the CPU’s Level 1 cache, which is typically used to improve on the efficiency of cache access. What this means is that the attacker could exploit this vulnerability to access the computer’s memory without having to know the computer’s physical address or shared memory. It also lets attackers use shared memory without invalidating the cache line.

AMD has yet to officially comment on the flaw and according to the researchers, they submitted their findings to the company in late August 2019, but have yet to hear back from them. That being said, there are some who are questioning the findings of this research, simply because it appears that Intel was the one who funded the research, which casts some doubt on its objectivity.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Computers
Tags: AMD, Hack, Security