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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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Requires kernel-level access. Also AMD is "releasing mitigations," so is it "unfixable?"
I think they meant it as "once infected may be impossible to disinfect." But it sure doesn't read that way at first glance.
Did they change it? Because now it says "Allows Deep, Virtually Unfixable Infections" and that seems to say exactly what you are.
Surely one could use the same exploit to restore the original boot code as the malware used to corrupt it
If you have kernel access you can already do almost everything so a vulnerability on top of that isn't that bad since no one should have kernel access to your computer
You mean like Crowdstrike?
~~Most~~ All antivirus software runs at kernel level
Which is precisely the reason you shouldn't use an AV apart from the one packaged with Windows
"They're going for the kernel!"
"Colonel who?"
Cancer. Brain. Brain cancer.
What does that mean to the rest of us?
It means it's what we in the trade call "a nothingburger". On Windows you need to explicitly install a malicious driver (which in turn requires to you to disable signature verification), on Linux you'd have to load a malicious kernel module (which requires pasting commands as root, and it would probably be proprietary since it has malware to hide and as every nvidia user knows, proprietary kernel modules break with kernel updates)
So install a multiplayer game, it has kernel level anticheat that opens a bunch of security holes, game over.
Kernel level access is absolutely achievable in the real world.
Not to be contrarian, but hackers have signed malicious code with compromised Microsoft driver certificates, so it's not out of the question that it could be snuck in without having to turn off signing.
nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel
No, it does not mean you would need to do that.
The more likely scenario is an attacker using another vulnerability, either in the OS itself or in a vendor-supplied component like a driver or anti-cheat module, to gain a foothold for this one. Chaining exploits is a very common technique. (What "trade" are you in, exactly?)
Apply the mitigations when they become available for your hardware, folks.
This article should say, with this one easy hack you can control an AMD users PC, all you gotta do is break into their home at 10pm right before they log off from browsing reddit and bam access.
Sounds like a plan!
It means that a malicious actor would already need to have hacked your computer quite deeply through some other vulnerability (or social engineering) before they could take advantage of this one. But I don't agree with another commenter here that this is a "nothingburger": this vulnerability enables such a hacker to leave undetectable malware that you just can't remove from the computer even if you replace everything but the motherboard. That's significant, particularly for anyone who might be a target of cyber-espionage.
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