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Comment by rebuilder | Hacker News Reader

Having a financial incentive to mess up AMD might explain why they only gave 24 hours' warning, though.

It's also a huge incentive to overstate the severity. Their goal is to profit off the panic they can produce, so every statement they make is likely heavily biased in that direction.

That said, I don't mind that these "research" organizations exist. Only bothers me when they put the general public at risk (or attempt to) for their own gain.

There is far far more incentive for AMD and its partners to understate the severity.

On an individual level, it's much less I'd think. Inciting a panic could be life changing amounts of money for the researchers, paid out by the hedge fund returns.

AMD isn't going to crash and burn over these flaws anymore than Intel (at 5 year high) did.

I disagree. AMD needs to maintain it's reputation over time. Short sellers make their profit over a few hours/days and don't care if they are proven wrong.

So, AMD has vastly more incentive to be accurate than short sellers.

Pity that vast incentive didn't seem to work out when they promoted all these chips as having "Firmware Trusted Platform Module", "Secure Encrypted Virtualization", "AMD Secure Processor", and "AMD Secure OS" as features.

AMDs incentive, like any corporation, is to maximise shareholder value. Same as any tiny little security research firm. If a research firm can maximise their profit buy discovering vulnerabilities and shorting stock before disclosing them, is that any ethically worse than a chip company rushing out flawed hardware with big flashy marketing bullet points claiming how secure they are?

(I'm not saying short-selling chip vendor stocks on the back of vulnerabilities is a way I'd choose to make a living, but surveillance capitalism doesn't seem an "ethically better" industry to work in either...)

CPU's have real value.

As to ethics that's mostly irrelevant to this discussion. Both sides could have ethical behavior, I am simply pointing out which side has the larger incentives to exaggerate. After all the stock could drop and a short seller could still lose money. They need the stock to drop a lot even over a minor issue.

I'd argue that vulnerability research has real value as well.

While the dollar value of AMDs incentive is without doubt larger - the existential value of the smaller amount incentivising the researcher is likely more motivating...

The point is the counter balance the other side - companies have an incentive to overstate their upside and understate their risk.

Short sellers want the opposite. So they both present their best cases and let the public decide, much like how lawyers will defend their own clients to the last breath regardless of the amount of evidence against them

This is the crux of it. The short disclosure window could hurt 3rd parties unnecessarily.

Although I enjoy reading grandparent's counterpoint

More and more lately I'm leaning towards the, "responsible disclosure is a bunch of crap" camp. You have to be "in" to get the news. Even if you're "in" security people love to play info war power games and withhold things because it tickles their jimmies, etc. And don't forget, you're deliberately keeping a vulnerability secret from consumers during a long period where you have no idea who else knows about it. If I'm a "user" or 3rd party and there's a critical vuln in some system I depend on, I want to know that I shouldn't use it or that I should take extra caution or whatever rather than being clueless in all in the name of the vendor's image.

This is how the whole industry ran in the mid-1990s. There were secret vendor lists that the cool kids got to be on. If you didn't have the right friends, you were shut out. Vendors took their sweet time getting patches out, because their preferred customers were all read in and had workarounds in place. It was a shitty way to organize an industry, and it fell apart with Bugtraq and full-disclosure security.

It's sad to see people arguing for a return to those norms, especially since the rejection of them correlates with a renaissance in our understanding how to secure software.

I agree, but I am curious if you have any suggestions on how we should be handling disclosure?

Don't sue people if they publish vulnerabilities without any notification to the vendor, as long as they never overstepped and exploited it themselves.

If some security researchers are currently choosing immediate highly publicised disclosure and short selling because it's the most profitable path for them - perhaps companies should reconsider their default/expected response to vendor-privileged-disclosure?

It's not like AMD set their chip prices based on "ethics" or "duty to the public". As "the public" I'd prefer a Ryzen 1900X to sell for $150 rather than $500 - It's just a bunch of sand after all (plus some intellectual effort). I don't think AMD get to choose their pricing model but then complain about how security companies price/sell their intellectual work...

For what it’s worth, this is a fierce debate that goes back decades. There is widespread disagreement among professionals in the field.

It looks like the short notice in this case is not intended to force a timely fix, but to prevent it. They are hoping to cause as much of damage to the company as possible both directly and indirectly through its customers so they can profiteer from it.

I'd say that the intent makes this qualitatively different to what I'd consider legitimate disclosure.

The flip side to that is to ask whether AMD have been "profiteering" from their customers by deceiving them about the security of their products?

It's not like their marketing copy makes accurate claims like:

"We're reasonably sure our Firmware Trusted Platform Module is trustworthy, but we ran out of time to pentest it properly before we shipped it."

"Ryzen features Probably-Secure Encrypted Virtualization! Our interns couldn't break it in a afternoon of trying! The data looks random enough to us..."

How much does "the intent" of their marketing copy and claims come into play?

But what if we give the list a really cool name like gazorpazorp?

> It's sad to see people arguing for a return to those norms

Where do you see anyone arguing for that? Or is it just a strawman? What I see is not people arguing against disclosure but people arguing for disclosure with an embargo longer than a day. You're going to have a hard time proving that one day is a norm, or that it correlates with a renaissance in securing software. Your response looks much more like circling the wagons when a member of your tribe is criticized.

> Having a financial incentive to mess up AMD might explain why they only gave 24 hours' warning, though.

A good way for companies to prevent this is to have a generous bug bounty program. Money is still transferred from the shareholders to the researchers, but then the company can impose conditions like delaying public disclosure for a reasonable time to prepare a fix.

If it's actually someone attempting to make money on a short or to benefit from a working relationship with a competitor, then a bug bounty program does nothing. No one can run a bounty program that pays out anywhere near as much as the information is actually worth to an adversary. Bug bounties work to engender a bit of good will among researchers and to provide some incentive to an otherwise neutral party to play ball. They don't mean shit to a hedge fund or a competitor in a multi-billion dollar industry.

Not unless the bounties are large enough to attract the attention of a hedge fund.

> Not unless the bounties are large enough to attract the attention of a hedge fund.

Which they should be if the alternative is a much larger loss to the company's share value. The shareholders come out ahead to pay five million on a bug bounty if the alternative is to lose a billion dollars in market cap.

I'm not a finance expert, but my very lay person understanding of how financial markets work tells me that those would have to be some rather huge bounties. See e.g., the effect on Intel from earlier this year:

https://qz.com/1171391/the-intel-intc-meltdown-bug-is-hittin...

It's not their problem. There's no obligation for them to give any warning at all. They can just go public, short the stock, and watch it fall. The warning is just a polite thing to do

Not even "polite" really, it's benefitting the vendors bottom line at the expense of the researchers.

Do you think there's _any_ chance AMD would have offered these guys money in the sort of magnitude they stand to gain short selling AMD?

I'm pretty sure if they'd asked AMD would have responded with a blackmail lawsuit instantly.

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