AMD has announced a series of firmware patches set to arrive in the coming weeks to address security issues raised by an Israeli security firm one week ago.
Photo: AP
In a March 13 white paper largely devoid of technical specifics, fledgling security firm CTS-Labs revealed numerous vulnerabilities affecting AMD processors. Because the researchers gave AMD less than 24 hours to respond – leading to widespread accusations of stock manipulation – this is the first official update from AMD regarding its research.
The company first emphasised that to take advantage of any of the issues raised by CTS-Labs, an attacker would first need to gain administrative (or root) access to the system. “Any attacker gaining unauthorised administrative access would have a wide range of attacks at their disposal well beyond the exploits identified in this research,” AMD said.
In defending itself for giving AMD less a day to address the issues, CTS-Labs said it believed it would take AMD “many, many months, or even a year” to mitigate the problems. However, AMD now says it expects to fix all of the issues within weeks via firmware patches and BIOS updates.
AMD said it does not expect any of the patches to impact performance.
Read more about specific updates on AMD’s website.