Hacker News Reader

I only skimmed through, but... was there no crypto that needed to be broken in order to hack microcode?

From the paper

> Our analysis focuses on the AMD K8/K10 microarchitecture since these CPUs do not use cryptographic signatures to verify the integrity and authenticity of microcode updates. Note that Intel started to cryptographically sign microcode updates in 1995 [15] and AMD started to deploy strong cryptographic protection in 2011 [15]. We assume that the underlying microcode update mechanism is similar, but cannot analyze the microcode updates since we cannot decrypt them.

So basically they found a way to change microcode in ten-year-old processors... though, it's still impressive.

Given the current state of PC market, there are plenty of those processors around.

I was kind of disappointed this wasn't on a modern processor. Finding a way to hack microcode updates on a modern Intel CPU would be HUGE, both as an attack vector, and because the Intel ME unit is a binary black box that prevents any modern Intel CPU from being completely security audited.

It's signed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com