This seems like yet another thing on the list of “x86 hardware issues that sound worse than they are”.
I’m interested to see what people are able to reverse engineer with these sorts of tools. It wasn’t even that long ago that ucode wasn’t even encrypted with integrity. I don’t think AMD started doing that until around 2010.
I’m also curious which hardware versions this works on, since it’s not obvious it’s universal. I’ll be amused if it’s some forlorn low power chip from 10 years ago.
>It wasn’t even that long ago that ucode wasn’t even encrypted with integrity
whether they're encrypted or not doesn't really matter. what actually matters is whether they're signed or not. There was a talk given in 2017 about trying to modify the microcode in AMD processors, but they were using processors from a decade ago (AMD K10, introduced 2007). That makes me think that processors made in the past decade are probably using signed microcode.
Yeah, although I didn't find the original paper. Reading into it more, they mention when AMD and Intel started signing their microcode.
>Note that Intel started to cryptographically sign microcode updates in 1995 [15] and AMD started to de-ploy strong cryptographic protection in 2011 [15].
I’m interested to see what people are able to reverse engineer with these sorts of tools. It wasn’t even that long ago that ucode wasn’t even encrypted with integrity. I don’t think AMD started doing that until around 2010.
I’m also curious which hardware versions this works on, since it’s not obvious it’s universal. I’ll be amused if it’s some forlorn low power chip from 10 years ago.