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AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

tomshardware.com

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Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

#141

Post by [deleted] »

iamnothere wrote: post #135
deno wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not relevant to memory encryption, after all the police could just plant any false evidence. You use video camera/CCTV and other evidence gathering to document such illegal police action. Suing after the fact is a valid strategy and in free countries this would allow you to exclude illegally obtained evidence or evidence lacking proper chain of custody.

If you sue them they will just beat you with a wrench again. Courts are imaginary. You should stop resisting. /s

[deleted]

Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

#142

Post by fc417fc802 »

nemomarx wrote: post #51
embedding-shape wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So reading between the lines, you're saying it's bad for AMD to disable undocumented features because people still might have bought them for those undocumented features, particularly for gaming servers?

You shouldn't be remotely disabling hardware features in my opinion at all. It's not really like changing an API or something, this is like an update removing something from your car or another appliance years after you bought it.

> You shouldn't be remotely disabling hardware features

I don't know what current case law is but I think that ought to be explicitly illegal. A physical product should be required to maintain the features that it had when it was purchased. Anything else is clearly cheating the consumer.

Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

#143

Post by kobalsky »

pshirshov wrote: post #71
nickjj wrote: post #68

I don't know how this works but does this mean if someone gained physical access to your locked running computer, they could gain access to your full encrypted drive and anything saved on disk? My reasoning there is if you used an encrypted drive, the decryption key you type when booting up would be stored in memory for the duration of that boot. This seems alarming because it means if someone broke into your living…

This feature was off by default in all the mobos I've seen. It causes many stability issues, as to my experience. The attack is sophisticated, Mr.Nobody, generally, should not worry about expensive cryogenic attacks - three letter guys would extract your key with a wrench. I mean the change is bad - it undermines already damaged trust, but the "average Joe" is extremely unlikely to be affected directly. There are man…

> three letter guys would extract your key with a wrench.

Are people still using this to justify no encryption? that comic sure did a lot of damage.

Mr. Nobody should be able to decide how much they want to protect themselves. If it's unstable maybe Mr Nobody is fine with it.

Raising the cost of achieving this to enterprise budgets, just because, seems suspect. Specially when there are so many attempts to undermine secure computing by the powers that be. [1] [2]

> There are many much cheaper ways to force you to give up your keys.

Yes, but that requires the Mr Nobody knowing you have access to them, which in itself is a big deal.

But let's think about it, why would they torture Mr Nobody by wrench? News stations would like to hear that, or do you think they will make Mr Nobody disappear too? Would they take those risks for a Mr Nobody?

Maybe the most realistic scenario is that people sometimes can hold onto their passwords. Scumbag or not. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Control [3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-...

Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

#145

Post by wang_li »

deno wrote: post #85
pshirshov wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feature was off by default in all the mobos I've seen. It causes many stability issues, as to my experience. The attack is sophisticated, Mr.Nobody, generally, should not worry about expensive cryogenic attacks - three letter guys would extract your key with a wrench. I mean the change is bad - it undermines already damaged trust, but the "average Joe" is extremely unlikely to be affected directly. There are man…

Unless you live in North Korea, China, Russia, UK, France, Australia or Ireland it’s still illegal to coerce or force someone to give up their personal keys or passwords, so this feature is still useful against some law-bound adversaries in free countries.

In a previous administration they apparently concluded that while the government can't violate your first amendment free speech rights, they can ask a third party to do so. So what makes you think that the CIA won't hire blackwater or the crips to hit your toes with a ball peen hammer until you tell them what you want to know, and then walk away having not violated your constitutional right to privacy and not incriminate yourself?

Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

#146

Post by bflesch »

benjojo12 wrote: post #24
bflesch wrote: post #22

It's a shame there is no software-based memory encryption included in the linux kernel. Especially cloud providers can easily snoop all your keys and you have zero recourse.

In a cloud provider situation there is no pure software solution to this, the hypervisor can always dump your memory pages / register states

It's one piece of a proper defense-in-depth approach. Europe needs to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

#147

Post by deno »

wang_li wrote: post #145
deno wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you live in North Korea, China, Russia, UK, France, Australia or Ireland it’s still illegal to coerce or force someone to give up their personal keys or passwords, so this feature is still useful against some law-bound adversaries in free countries.

In a previous administration they apparently concluded that while the government can't violate your first amendment free speech rights, they can ask a third party to do so. So what makes you think that the CIA won't hire blackwater or the crips to hit your toes with a ball peen hammer until you tell them what you want to know, and then walk away having not violated your constitutional right to privacy and not incrimi…

I don’t want to get into specifics because ultimately it just comes down to the logical argument that just because a strategy is not by itself successful against all possible threats it doesn’t mean it’s worthless. By this logic you wouldn’t lock your front doors.

Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

#148

Post by hugmynutus »

Everyone jumping up about "enshitification". I tried to enable this feature on QEMU and it broke my VMs because the secure memory system was board-line hopelessly broken/non-functional.

Did anyone even use this feature?

Yes it is dishonest to remove features but from perspective AMD disabled a feature that never worked in the first place. The feature never should've been advertised as enabled.

Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

#149

Post by mort96 »

andsoitis wrote: post #136
mort96 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great example of a non-sequitur. I will interpret this to mean you concede and are not interested in continuing this conversation.

Why are you upset about the removal of this particular “feature”?

I'm not a user of it, so It's not hurting me personally. But if I had read about how Ryzen CPUs support encrypted memory, and had chosen a Ryzen CPU for that reason, I think I'd have a pretty good reason to be upset that the feature I needed from a hardware product I bought suddenly vanished in a firmware update.

Because I think ethics goes further than "bad thing happened to me", I've formed an opinion that this is a pretty shitty move.

Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

#150

Post by ezconnect »

deno wrote: post #85
pshirshov wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feature was off by default in all the mobos I've seen. It causes many stability issues, as to my experience. The attack is sophisticated, Mr.Nobody, generally, should not worry about expensive cryogenic attacks - three letter guys would extract your key with a wrench. I mean the change is bad - it undermines already damaged trust, but the "average Joe" is extremely unlikely to be affected directly. There are man…

Unless you live in North Korea, China, Russia, UK, France, Australia or Ireland it’s still illegal to coerce or force someone to give up their personal keys or passwords, so this feature is still useful against some law-bound adversaries in free countries.

The West just a few years ago declared that at airport entry points, no one is including their citizen is not protected by any law when it comes to providing access to your private stuff.
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