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Message For AMD: Open PSP Will Improve Security, Hinder Intel
futuristicrabbit writes: AMD has faced calls from Edward Snowden, Libreboot and the Reddit community to release the source code to the AMD Secure Processor (PSP), a network-capable co-processor which some believe has the capacity to act as a backdoor. Opening the PSP would not only have security benefits, but would provide AMD with a competitive advantage against rival chipmaker Intel. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, is reportedly seriously considering the change, and the community is working hard to make sure she makes the right decision. In an AMD AMA post via Reddit, user 1n5aN1aC provided several arguments for why the company should release the PSP source code to the Coreboot / Libreboot project (or publicly). The arguments center around security, economic incentives, advertising, brand perception, and mindshare. AMD replied: "Thanks for the inquiry. Currently we do not have plans to release source code but you make a good argument for reasons to do so. We will evaluate and find a way to work with security vendors and the community to everyone's benefit." The product manager for AMD, AMD_james, continued in response to a follow-up comment that claims AMD is "not considering it all but only want to appease the potential buyers." AMD_james replied: "Thanks for the feedback. Please believe me that this has CEO level attention and AMD is investigating the steps and resources necessary to support this. It is not the work of a minute, so please bear with us as we define what we can do." What are your arguments for (or against) the idea of AMD releasing the source code to the AMD Secure Processor?
Pros: it'd increase security (review), be what some customers want, give AMD an edge against Intel at no monetary cost.
Con: it's against express wishes of US three letter agencies who want their backdoors
So... no.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
For some random package, open source is not necessarily more secure (no one bothers to review). Same for even high profile targets that are too big to humanly review (browsers) although available source already gives quite an edge. But the PSP code is really small, and has a horde of researches salivating at the thought of taking a look.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
If they open it up, Intel will be the loser.
No one trusts Intel ME.
In the GPU arena, AMD has been pretty active in contributing the the GPU drivers, to the point newer cards can game nicely Linux systems with the in-kernel drivers. Perhaps a similar thought-pattern will apply to other products.
If I remember correctly even there they have some firmware that runs on the GPU that is closed source. It could have been on a ROM/EPROM, but it's loaded by the driver. Truth is, if you don't trust the hardware it doesn't matter. You could have a magic number trigger like
mov ax, 0xDEADBEEF
mov bx, 0xABCD1234
mov cx, 0xC1AC0D35
mov dx, 0xN5AC0D3S
nop
And that would brick it or enable a secret spy mode. The only way you could validate that the CPU only does exactly what it's advertised to do would be to put it under an electron microscope and validate the transistor design. Of course open source is better than closed source, it's harder to hide this shit in hardware. But if you want to put on the tin foil hat there's no reason to trust it either way.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I agree with you that this will matter only once AMD actually delivers. But my conclusion is the opposite: instead of buying certain to be backdoored Intel, my next laptop will be a Pinebook, using entirely free software with no firmware blobs, in control of the machine from the moment ROM code loads and jumps to the SPL.
I don't care much about customer's servers, as they don't carry my data -- I do mention the issues but don't force anyone to pander to what I consider reasonable.
On my home primary desktop, though, I use an old Phenom2 x6, from before AMD processors became backdoored. It is adequate for my needs (I don't mess with big packages), although recently I started to do more kernel compiles and indeed the machine feels long in the tooth. Let's see how the brouchacha ends up.
And don't call me too paranoid. I'm nowhere near a juicy target, but I still can upload Debian packages, and source-only/reproducible uploads are not yet mandatory. For example, I recently NMUed dash (aka /bin/sh), my upload will be the one used in Stretch and thus on millions of servers, some of which are juicy targets. Now think if the binary didn't happen to be produced by the source, and had some "extras". Built with non-standard compiler options and/or version to thwart disassemble diffs -- let's take a SVN build of clang from halfway between major releases, that'd kill automated review nicely. If you feel extra vicious, doing some arithmetic on syscall arguments will defeat static analysis. Make your payload's trigger depend on a hash of unobvious characteristics of your target, and perhaps even use that hash in the above syscall arithmetic.
Yeah, it is possible to hide an intentional hole in plain view in the source (the Underhanded C Contest has some ideas how) but that's insanely more work, and if you're not a regular contributor to a project you want to suborn it'd be tricky to submit large enough piece of code to survive review. In comparison, passing a tainted binary is so much easier -- and thus, cost-effective, that at this moment I'd expect a rational attacker to go this way.
Thus, even though I'm a mere unimportant Debian Developer, I am trusted (in the negative sense of the word) with your security, and thus it's my duty to do my best. Yeah, some of Debian buildds and archive machines do use recent Intel CPUs, but they're also far more watched than my private machines and thus it'd be harder to suborn them without being noticed than the dash hack I just described.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
If AMD embraced open firmware, it would make a huge difference in numerous markets: obviously cloud and web-hosting, but also HPC (my field).