this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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If you already have local administrator privileges, you have access to the system and its data anyway. Doesn't seem that critical a flaw. It doesn't even survive reboots.
Regardless, AMD has already issued a fix.
Edit: seems I may be mistaken.
If I'm understanding this correctly this opens up the door to a serious type of rootkit.
It's not a matter of attackers having access to the data. It's that they have replaced your hardware with malicious hardware.
Additionally It can be trivial to gain administrative capacity on a personal computer. But in a regular case you can just reinstall the operating system. This would survive that.
Aren't microcode updates erased after restarts?
As far as them being applied, yes. The loaded microcode is volatile.
They can kind of persist across cold reboots, but it relies on them being applied again at some point. The motherboard vendor can apply microcode updates during platform initialization before POSTing. Or they can be applied from EFI (modern equivalent of BIOS) before handing control to the kernel. Or they can be applied very early in the boot process by the kernel.