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even for consumers, the existence of a PSP implies that you don’t want that PSP to become compromised. It has the complete ability to fuck with your container i
by paulmd 2y ago
even for consumers, the existence of a PSP implies that you don’t want that PSP to become compromised. It has the complete ability to fuck with your container instance in any way it wants with no mitigations possible.
You immediately fall into trusting-trust problems around working in an inherently compromised environment where an attacker can manipulate you in arbitrary ways. You think reading a file twice produces the same results? You think adding two numbers or doing an if-statement returns the proper result? Not if the hardware is malicious.
Beyond the broader “should this exist”, once it is a given that it exists, it’s an incredibly powerful weapon and it certainly shouldn’t be left unsecured. This is the thing that can see the true state of memory, hold all the keys, and even just arbitrarily rewrite memory state or processor state. This is god on this system.
The fact that people see that and say “well you’d have to type sudo to permanently own the machine!” as some kind of excuse or downplaying is nuts and wouldn’t be tolerated from any other brand. But AMD always gets extra benefit-of-the-doubt and kid-glove treatment.
When intel gets compromised nobody does the “ok but should we really have a hypervisor ring anyway???” shit. The amount of special pleading people do on behalf of AMD is insane.
And people would never tolerate intel leaving a bunch of hardware exploits unpatched like some of AMD’s exploits have been.
- ndriscoll 2y agoI think people's reaction to e.g. Intel ME and SGX is also "this shouldn't exist on consumer hardware", and it makes perfect sense to be happy about being able to control both as the owner. The owner is supposed to be god on the system. They're supposed to have a sudo that really gives them full power over everything. sudo (on the bare metal ring) is supposed to let the user see the true state of everything, hold all the keys, arbitrarily rewrite memory, etc.
- paulmd 2y agothank you for exemplifying the mindset to which I was referring. yes, that’s the weird sickly affection for AMD, and the weird sickly philosophical defense of a high-severity CVE on pseudointellectual principles. people would really rather we rethink the whole of secure-boot rather than admit AMD has a serious bug they won’t fix, lol
- ndriscoll 2y agoIt has nothing to do with AMD vs Intel. I'm glad if these things become "compromised" in both cases because they're designed to undermine the owner. They shouldn't be on consumer chips, and if they don't actually do what they say, great! Control can be restored to the person to whom it belongs. I'm also happy that you can get a cheap converter to plug your Ryobi batteries into your DeWalt drill, breaking their anti-consumer "features". Likewise with third party printer ink. All good stuff.
- panzi 2y agoEver since I heard of TCPA in the early 2000s I was of the opinion that this is technology that undermines the owner's control of their own computer. Back then it even seemed as if that is a move by Microsoft to get rid of Linux, which gladly didn't happen. It has nothing to do wit Intel Vs AMD. At all.