Re:Lenovo vendor locking Ryzen CPUs with AMD PSB
by akelly on Sunday January 16, 2022 @03:46PM
(#29959813)
Good analysis. My question is wouldn't it be both more secure and more user friendly to burn the BIOS signing public keys into the motherboard chipset instead of the CPU?
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Re:Lenovo vendor locking Ryzen CPUs with AMD PSB
by woobilicious on Sunday January 23, 2022 @11:08PM
(#30053640)
Most people here don't seem to understand the entire point of this is to stop hardware tampering.
The goal of AMD's SEV and other features is that the only way to compromise the system is to tamper the wires between the CPU die and the IO die, that all data going outside the CPU die is encrypted, an extra hardware TPM chip module let you MITM the keys being sent to the CPU, having the keys stored in the CPU using fTPM, and never plaintext / keys leave or enter the CPU via PCIe or memory bus.
the "chipset" is literally just a PCIe/USB multiplexer these days, the CPU has no access to external hardware until after the firmware has loaded, the firmware has routines for turning on the memory and memory controller, PCIe etc, I don't think people understand just how utterly useless the CPU is without the firmware.