![]() Those flaws were made public under highly suspicious circumstances and with the involvement of a short-seller firm, Viceroy Research. Some of the security issues at play here are related to those raised last year by CTS-Labs. The ability to analyze the PSP's firmware could lead to DRM cracks or the discovery of further security flaws. Hardware DRM support can be implemented through the PSP (and likely has been, as far as Windows 10's 4K playback scheme is concerned). Presumably, the A5 is still the core of choice. ![]() We don't necessarily know what type of CPU core AMD uses - AMD's initial APUs used a Cortex-A5, but ARM supports the product across all Cortex-A chips and some Cortex-M processors. AMD CPUs (Opens in a new window) and APUs equipped with a PSP integrate an ARM CPU core to handle these functions. UEFITool is described in its own repository as a cross-platform application for modifying and extracting firmware images.ĪMD's PSP uses ARM's TrustZone software. PSPTool favourably works with UEFI images as obtained through BIOS updates. However, all binary blobs by AMD are located in padding volumes unparsable by UEFITool. These are usually 16MB in size and can be conveniently parsed by UEFITool. It is based on reverse-engineering efforts of AMD's proprietary filesystem used to pack firmware blobs into UEFI Firmware Images. It locates AMD firmware inside UEFI images as part of BIOS updates targeting AMD platforms. PSPTool is a Swiss Army knife for dealing with firmware of the AMD Secure Processor (formerly known as Platform Security Processor or PSP). The PSPTool (Opens in a new window) is intended to allow for a greater examination of AMD firmware than the company has allowed. Proponents of a more open approach have called for Intel and AMD to provide far more information publicly. Closed-source software developers and many hardware companies have often incorporated the principle of security through obscurity into their security systems, reasoning that limiting the available information about a solution will also limit its addressable attack surface. ![]() This is scarcely unique to the two x86 manufacturers. And while it's not clear that there are practical exploits in the wild that make use of these capabilities, their existence and obfuscation are enough to give security white-hats a severe case of heartburn. If you can hack the IME or AMD's PSP, you can theoretically run code on a computer that's completely invisible to the end-user. Security researchers have been publicly unhappy with AMD and Intel's decision to keep details of how these chips operate under wraps because they function in secret, entirely divorced from the operation of the primary CPU or operating system. Note: PSPTool has nothing to do with Sony's old PSP handheld.ĪMD's PSP is its equivalent of the Intel Management Engine and has been criticized for many of the same issues as that solution. A security researcher named Christian Werling has released a new tool, called PSPTool, that researchers can use to analyze the firmware used by AMD's Secure Platform Processor (PSP).
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