Last Updated on 22/11/2021 by Sanskriti
AMD recommended Windows customers to upgrade their operating systems this week in order to obtain a fix for a serious vulnerability in one of its CPU chipset drivers that may be used to dump system memory and steal sensitive data from AMD-powered PCs. The vulnerability, which has been assigned the number CVE-2021-26333 and was discovered by Kyriakos Economou, co-founder of security company ZeroPeril, is located in the driver for AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP), which is AMD’s version of Intel’s SGX technology.
The AMD PSP, also known as a trusted execution environment (TEE), establishes secure enclaves within AMD processors that allow the operating system to handle sensitive data within cryptographically secured memory.
The Windows OS utilizes a kernel driver called amdsps. sys to communicate with PSP enclaves.
However, in a paper released on Wednesday, Economou stated that he discovered two flaws in this driver that allow a non-admin user to dump system memory and search for sensitive data managed by the OS.
“During our tests, we managed to leak several gigabytes of uninitialized physical pages,” the ZerPeril co-founder said.
Before disclosing the vulnerability to AMD earlier this year in April, Economou said they successfully tested assaults on AMD Ryzen 2000- and 3000-series CPUs.
When Microsoft released its monthly batch of security updates known as Patch Tuesday on Tuesday, AMD issued its own alert encouraging users to install them because they included patches for its PSP chipset driver.
This week the company said, “AMD recommends updating to AMD PSP driver 5.17.0.0 through Windows Update or by updating to AMD Chipset Driver 3.08.17.735.”
Users of the following AMD CPU models will need to update their systems, according to the Santa Clara-based hardware maker.
- 6th Generation AMD FX APU with Radeon™ R7 Graphics
- AMD A10 APU with Radeon R6 Graphics
- AMD A8 APU with Radeon R6 Graphics
- AMD A6 APU with Radeon R5 Graphics
- AMD A4-Series APU with Radeon Graphics
- AMD Athlon™ X4 Processor
- AMD E1-Series APU with Radeon Graphics
- AMD Ryzen™ 1000 series Processor
