I would say they are all invasive evil maid threat vectors. Each one requires either physical access to the hardware or (as you stated) an already established root privileges. We all know that if you have physical access to hardware, it's essentially game over.
However. One of the vulnerabilities supposedly allowed to subvert UEFI secure boot. If that's true and allows to boot arbitrary media, then the others are equally feasible, because an attacker can boot into a root shell of their choosing.
The timing in this disclosure reeks of malice, though. Giving a 24h advance warning basically allows the outfits to claim that they disclosed vulnerabilities to manufacturer before going public. Technically true. Just highly misleading and dishonest.
I have personally no beef with full disclosure, and have advocated it as a viable mechanism since the mid 1990's. I also happen to think that responsible disclosure is a good approach, but it definitely needs the threat of FD as a stick, because otherwise vendors would not have any real incentives to work on addressing security bugs. Name-and-shame does work.
Let's get back to AMD flaws. Giving a really short window? Basically just enough to have an initial PR response ready? Have the decency to go full disclosure. Or give a full month. AMD won't be fixing the bugs before news breaks in either case. Just don't claim this is anything but a maliciously crafted exercise with ulterior motives.
What does that even mean? What do you think "ethics" means? This is a nonsensical statement.
The consideration of what people in certain situations should or should not do, IS ethics.
Even if someone would say (for some reason) "but researchers should be able to do their work without consideration", that is making an ethical statement.
I understand why you would have a problem mapping this back to ethics, because if you'd formulate it as such, it would sound kind of bad: Researchers have no ethical responsibilities to the public.
You can't choose to not let decisions be guided by ethics, that's like claiming you choose to find your way without navigating. It makes no sense.
You seem like a living argument for ethical standards being imposed on your industry, by law if needed.
You're arguing that the force of law should prevent you from learning inconvenient things about the software you use.
You are harmed by them discovering a vulnerability and telling the world about it.
And if they discover a vulnerability and tell both you and the rest of the world, the harm may easily outweigh the benefit.
Suppose I go wandering around the city where you live, checking for unlocked house doors. I find that you've left your front door unlocked and gone on holiday. I then wander the streets shouting "Thomas's house is unlocked and no one's at home!". I also phone you up to let you know your house is unlocked.
It was your fault, not mine, that the house was unlocked and no one at home to deter burglars. In principle, anyone else could have come along and burgled your house, if they'd found it before I did. None the less, I think that in this scenario I have done you wrong.
The argument against your position that people are trying to get across to you is not that. It is that publication of vulnerability without giving heads-up and time to prepare solution to the vendor greatly increases the risk that a user will be harmed by attackers exploiting the public knowledge. Often substantial number of users are not going to mitigate or resolve the problem without their vendor giving out the official solution.
It's certainly reasonable to argue which kind of disclosure is the best way to achieve minimal harm, but my opinion is that it's unethical to disclose without considering what method of disclosure will do the least harm, or, worse, just not caring and going for the "biggest splash", as is what it seems these researchers did.
I know everyone in my family is ignorant of this “disclosed” security flaw and is powerless to mitigate the vulnerabilities disclosed on their own. Even if they did know to “turn off their computer” as someone said, are they supposed to wait until someone calls them to tell them a patch is ready?
Disclosing a vulnerability for profit at the expense of everyone else is a shitty thing to do. Would giving AMD a few days to fix it have hurt as many people as giving them one day?
Continued education to help end users get to the point where they can make meaningful and educated decisions is great, and should be pursued, and I do it where I can (though most of the time there's just a shrug and a "whatever"). But, barring that, somebody's gotta make choices on their behalf, and there's a Jerry Garcia quote for this one, you know? With great power comes great responsibility, and we gave ourselves that power. And, outside of a security context, this is why I unflinchingly come down on people who work for shit companies that hurt people, why I'd never hire someone who worked for, say, a toolbar vendor in the 90's/00's and why I have fired clients before when I discovered they were doing shitty things with data gleaned from people who trust them: because we have ethical responsibilities to the people downstream of us who are ill-equipped to make meaningful, educated decisions. I can't compel anyone to do as I do--but I can say that one should, because it's decent.
I can't agree that the power switch is a reasonable mitigation in 2018. In the nineties, sure, but too much of life revolves around this garbage we invented and keep mostly creaking along. (Should it? Probably not. Does it? Yeah.) We are on a ratchet, we can't go back, and kicking the decision down to people who literally-literally lack the tools to make a wise decision while painting a target on them for bad actors who can take advantage of them is profoundly disturbing to me.
This particular vulnerability is a post-compromise privilege escalation flaw, yes. But it strikes me that the conversation must be bigger than that, because the same arguments are used for both. This? Low stakes. Heartbleed? Incalculably high stakes. But the same argument could/would (if it were found by shitheads rather than people with a certain amount of decency to them) be used for the latter instead of the former, and that's what makes me itch.
(And to be clear, irrespective of this conversation, you know I am a big fan.)
I don't see how you get there from here.
But I think that should be done after mitigations are in place to protect end users, or if the vendor is not taking good-faith steps to mitigate the problem.
And I am not saying one should be "restrained from speaking" at all. I am saying that choosing to do so makes one an asshole, and that decent people should strive to not be assholes.
You seem to have several deeply misguided premises.
1. We don't know ARM knowingly shipped these chips although they were vulnerable. Bugs happen.
2. Even if this was the case, an individual can show, and ought to, show decency and empathy towards others.
3. This last comment of yours is a straw man and I doubt you are incapable of seeing this. You parent's argument was much more nuanced and elaborate than your rebuttal.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/cio5rg/chappelle-s-show-tupac-...
This being a controversial topic straight at the intersection of technology, the way it changed and affected society, the public good and our dependence on technology, I really don't think that "I haven't changed my mind about this in 28 years" supports your argument ...
And honestly I would say that whether I agree or not.
I wasn't working in security but I definitely moved my opinion on the matter. In the (late) 90s I was mostly for full public disclosure arguing the same "we're better off when we have the most information available to us". But today I'm leaning way more towards "responsible disclosure is good" (as you can tell I'm also not 100% black-and-white on the matter like you said you are).
Maybe it's because I was younger then and had more of a reckless mentality and an innocent belief that people will make the right choices given enough information.
Maybe it's because in the past 28 years technology has changed our society to such an extent that impact of security vulnerabilities is rather incomparable to the impact they had back then.
Maybe it's because I definitely don't believe that you can defend this opinion with the very same arguments that were used back then without even addressing the spread of information technology and the drastic way they altered society in the past 28 years.
Maybe it's because I now realise that I myself am not always better off with more information if I can't act on it, and therefore it's not reasonable to assume it as a general rule. Which is very much something I had yet to learn 28 years ago, had to swallow some pride. I wish everybody was a clever as I was back then ...
So if a hospital runs a life support on a vulnerable chip, they should just hit the power switch until it's fixed.
Or what about a computer controlling a nuclear power plant? An airplane? Spacecraft or Satellite?
Vulnerabilities don't restrict themselves to equipment that is non-essential for people to survive or would cost millions to replace in consequence of a hack or shutdown (please try to revive a sat after you did a full shutdown, I will be awaiting your report on how you'll align the antenna)
The premise of your argument is that without vendor cooperation, end-users are helpless to mitigate the impact of security flaws.
No, they aren't. Not only are they not helpless, but many of them are in fact ethically obligated to mitigate exposures with or without the assistance of their vendors. Almost every end user has at least one last-resort mitigation for any vulnerability: the power switch.
Most of the time, most users have better non-patching mitigations than that. These vulnerabilities are all post-compromise privilege escalation flaws. Their exploitation is situational and most users can do things to eliminate the situation that enables their exploit.
You might not like the fact that end-users have to make hard, expensive choices about how to mitigate flaws. But if you think about it for just a second, you'll see that the idea that patches were saving them from this choice was fallacious. There is no reason to believe these 4 dudes were the only ones in the world capable of finding these flaws (the reality is that if they're the only ones who know about them, it's because the kinds of flaws they found simply aren't important enough to demand focused attention from others). All restricted disclosure does is prevent end users from making the choice for themselves.
I believe that as a general rule, we're better off when we have the most information available to us about vulnerabilities. Personally, I'd probably stop short of publishing exploit code. But other researchers that most of us respect a great deal in the abstract do not have that particular scruple, and some --- like the original Metasploit project --- made it a point to publish exploit code immediately, patch or no patch, to arm operators with information about their exposure.
This isn't an idle opinion. If there was working Usenet search in 2018, you could find me making approximately the same argument back in the 1990s, when I worked as a researcher at SNI, the world's first commercial vulnerability research lab.