News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Undocumented x86 instructions in Intel CPUs that can modi... by gruez on Friday March 19, 2021 @11:15PM (#26520546)
>It wasn’t even that long ago that ucode wasn’t even encrypted with integrity

whether they're encrypted or not doesn't really matter. what actually matters is whether they're signed or not. There was a talk given in 2017 about trying to modify the microcode in AMD processors, but they were using processors from a decade ago (AMD K10, introduced 2007). That makes me think that processors made in the past decade are probably using signed microcode.

Re:Undocumented x86 instructions in Intel CPUs that can modi... by colejohnson66 on Friday March 19, 2021 @11:24PM (#26520572)
Re:Undocumented x86 instructions in Intel CPUs that can modi... by gruez on Friday March 19, 2021 @11:38PM (#26520629)
Yeah, although I didn't find the original paper. Reading into it more, they mention when AMD and Intel started signing their microcode.

>Note that Intel started to cryptographically sign microcode updates in 1995 [15] and AMD started to de-ploy strong cryptographic protection in 2011 [15].