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A comment on PSPTool Is a Swiss Army Knife for the Firmware of the AMD Secure Processor. Parent comment

Re:PSPTool Is a Swiss Army Knife for the Firmware of the AMD... by cwerling on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @02:57PM (#20107954)
PSPTool author here. Since all PSP firmware must be signed by AMD, something like a psp_cleaner would be possible given that a bug in the firmware allows to inject arbitrary code. This was shown by CTS-Labs earlier. [1]

[1] https://msrnd-cdn-stor.azureedge.net/bluehat/bluehatil/2019/...

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Re:PSPTool Is a Swiss Army Knife for the Firmware of the AMD... by StudentStuff on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @03:15PM (#20108095)
Wow, only the header is signed (for the Ryzenfall-1 bug)? That is a pretty big oversight, did AMD attempt to patch these bugs?
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Re:PSPTool Is a Swiss Army Knife for the Firmware of the AMD... by zanny on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @03:42PM (#20108352)
If there is anything these secret proprietary built in hardware backdoors are its that they are very poorly thought out.
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Re:PSPTool Is a Swiss Army Knife for the Firmware of the AMD... by fwip on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @07:51PM (#20110245)
It does seem to be a pattern. I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head:

1. Incompetence - The engineers try to get it right, but fail due to skill, budget or time constraints.

2. Malice - This allows bad actors to compromise the PSP for evil

3. Benevolence - This allows hardware owners to alter the PSP for their own protection.

I think the smart money is on #1, but they're all interesting to think about.

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Re:PSPTool Is a Swiss Army Knife for the Firmware of the AMD... by StudentStuff on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @07:55PM (#20110263)
ARM is the designer of the PSP, if its incompetence then they're the ones at fault.

AMD states that the PSP is "ARM TrustZone ... Industry standard" https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/security

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Re:PSPTool Is a Swiss Army Knife for the Firmware of the AMD... by rurban on Thursday June 06, 2019 @12:26AM (#20111590)
That's supposed for data-only modules, so they can patch in live data later, without the need to fetch it from some flash or bios. I think no-one should call code from it.
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Re:PSPTool Is a Swiss Army Knife for the Firmware of the AMD... by ebcode on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @03:13PM (#20108083)
thanks for posting the link. looking forward to the day when we can run post-2012 cpus knowing we'll be able to lock the backdoor.
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Re:PSPTool Is a Swiss Army Knife for the Firmware of the AMD... by ilikenwf on Friday June 07, 2019 @01:22PM (#20126774)
Would this be something you would be interested in implementing? I still use Intel stuff only because no psp_cleaner exists yet.

I think the coreboot guys would also be interested in something like this, too.

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