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thg 1 hours ago [-]
This was never marketed as a feature of the consumer CPUs and if some malignant actor does get physical access to my (consumer) hardware, then them being able to read out bytes through cryo-freezing the RAM really isn't high up on the list of things I'm going to worry about.
close04 16 minutes ago [-]
Transparent communication would have been appreciated nonetheless. You have customers not just lawyers on the other side, it's not just about making sure you're legally covered.
ZiiS 2 hours ago [-]
If it can be silently removed was it a security feature?
Whilst I hate companies paying engineers to make things worse just to segment their market; I am not really seeing this as an important feature outside the data-center? If an evil-maid has hardware access they hack the USB and/or PCI not the RAM surely?
mike_hock 58 minutes ago [-]
Sneakily and silently removing a feature in a firmware revision is not acceptable, security or otherwise.
p0w3n3d 29 minutes ago [-]
if anyone does it sneakily, there is alleged wrongdoing attached to it. I can imagine multiple scenarios like some well-known Israeli company "selling their software only to governments", paying quite amount of money for it, because they were unable to break this one.
close04 14 minutes ago [-]
> there is alleged wrongdoing attached to it
Probably not from a legal perspective, but morally yes. Apple cause batterygate with good intentions but sneakily. Not being transparent is what shot them in the foot. AMD didn't learn anything or think this is small-time so no blowback (sadly they might be right).
Integer 28 minutes ago [-]
I had this enabled as it protects against RAMbleed/ECC errors, so it's not limited to physical attacks.
Elfener 1 hours ago [-]
I would be fine with this if it meant CPUs became slightly cheaper, but we know that's not going to happen.
And there's been talk that now the so-called "AI companies" will start using more CPUs as well, due to "personal agentic agents", so I hope that people won't be priced out of CPUs too...
k__ 51 minutes ago [-]
I'm curious about Denuvo's opinion on that.
rusk 5 minutes ago [-]
I wonder what the additional power draw of these features would be. Parenthetically, I wonder often about the energy impact of all these HTTPS localhost links, and is there a point where defense-in-depth has to give way to other concerns?
But yeah 95% of the consumer market don't care about this and it's only adding unnecessary costs
lompad 2 hours ago [-]
Any idea what's happening? This sounds _bad_.
voxadam 1 hours ago [-]
Market segmentation.
ykonstant 2 hours ago [-]
I would also like to know. Surely some people here have at least second-hand knowledge, and silence can sometimes be deafening.
themafia 2 hours ago [-]
> To be fair to AMD, there is no clear indication that the company ever publicly advertised TSME as a consumer Ryzen feature.
A feature that was possibly accidentally enabled on consumer chips is now being disabled. I would guess that the number of owners of consumer chips who also relied on them for encryption is exceedingly small.
The primary concern persists. The manufacturer has an exceptional amount of control of the state of your CPU most of which you cannot change and an unknown chunk of which you cannot even see. We are sort of playing in a fools paradise.
willis936 1 hours ago [-]
How can manufacturers simultaneously have exceptional control over flags and not enough control to know what flags are enabled on their shipping products?
They either have that control or they don't.
rincebrain 5 minutes ago [-]
AMD, historically, has taken a "we don't test enterprise features on consumer SKUs, but we don't fuse them off if you really want to qualify it or let them try it" approach to e.g. ECC on consumer chips with Zen.
So it's quite possible they were doing the same with TSME, and either made a rude marketing decision that the people using it on consumer chips would probably pay for PRO chips if they were prevented from doing so, or kept getting people attempting to RMA the chips for a feature they never said worked on them not working, or there's some systemic flaw in the consumer chip's implementation that they didn't feel like trying to qualify fixing versus just killing the not-guaranteed support.
Hard to guess without more data than just them going silent about it.
lmz 1 hours ago [-]
They always had control. Awareness is a different thing. You could just as well ask "if you've written every line of code, why did you write that bug?".
willis936 5 minutes ago [-]
I'm trying to progress the discussion past "we don't know if it was intentional". We know it was intentional. What was the intention of having it on before and what is the intention of turning it off?
58 minutes ago [-]
nikanj 41 minutes ago [-]
You choose every piece of food you eat, how do you not know all the macros?
willis936 7 minutes ago [-]
This analogy holds true if I invented every molecule in my food.
Ygg2 1 hours ago [-]
To be fair same can't be said of ECC, even though ECC should be basic feature out of the box.
rekttrader 1 hours ago [-]
Hint: NSA said no.
bflesch 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
matja 28 minutes ago [-]
There was a patch called Tresor that did this, but I don't think it was updated for a long time.
You have to store the encryption key in CPU registers and ensure it's not saved to RAM during task switching or power suspend operations. Tresor used x86-specific debug registers for it, but you could potentially use unused SIMD registers if you masked-off the CPUID bits for them and disabled them for access by user-space.
But securing against attacks from a hostile hypervisor or a server provider needs more than just memory encryption, because they can intercept any part of the boot process and control the hardware/firmware that can lie to your kernel.
To counter that you'd need something like AMD SEV(ES/SNP) with measured boot and remote attestation to switch the only thing you trust to the CPU manufacturer (best you can do IMO).
pbmonster 14 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
benjojo12 39 minutes ago [-]
In a cloud provider situation there is no pure software solution to this, the hypervisor can always dump your memory pages / register states
pjmlp 26 minutes ago [-]
Another example on how AMD is hardly the good guys.
shiiiit 1 hours ago [-]
This will be re-added in a few years. The current flip-flop is just enshittification.
miga 1 hours ago [-]
It is sad that once again we will be exposed to more criminals trying to steal our data. Memory encryption not only allows to secure memory from physical "cold RAM", but also prevents loss of encryption keys as it hides the content during transfer.
garganzol 1 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth, RAM encryption belongs to professional SKUs. It's the right business decision that should have been made from from the very beginning.
For most consumer users, RAM encryption primarily adds power consumption and heat generation while providing little practical benefit. They simply don't face many of the threat vectors and attack scenarios that certain industries and enterprise environments must contend with.
olavgg 29 minutes ago [-]
I disagree, I play a lot around with enterprise stuff. Its insane that I need to buy enterprise grade hardware that costs 1000x more for lab/experimentation/learning. My only alternative is to wait a few years, and get it from Ebay.
I also believe that a strong reason that Optane pdimm's failed, was that it was only available on enterprise servers so hackers didn't get a chance to play with it and build software that took advantage of this special hardware.
Just look at how specialized Infiniband is, even though its awesome and has some great use cases. If it was a commodity tech, there would be 100x times more applications/software that took advantage of it.
baq 52 minutes ago [-]
how do you know what threats I face? how do you know what threats journalists and whistleblowers face?
this is approximately the same discussion as with ECC RAM: the benefits vastly outweigh the slight performance loss and die area increases.
bakugo 15 minutes ago [-]
ECC passively benefits everyone, even people who don't know what it is or why it's useful. Everyone can be a victim of random bit flips, it's not a targeted threat.
Memory encryption, on the other hand, provides absolutely no benefit to 99.999% of users. If you consider yourself to be such a high value target that you suspect someone might gain physical access to your hardware without your knowledge and carry out extremely sophisticated hardware attacks to extract your data, you are a tiny minority and it makes sense that such niche protections would require buying specialized hardware. Even then, the odds of such an attack being chosen instead of a far less sophisticated software-based approach are also tiny.
Of course, if the hardware itself supports the feature and AMD simply decided to disable it, that's still a shitty thing to do, but let's not pretend that it is in any way comparable to ECC.
bflesch 43 minutes ago [-]
Weird, maybe you should start posting about the Epstein stuff and you'll quickly learn about your threat situation.
rubyn00bie 1 hours ago [-]
This is an absurd take since the referenced chips in the article are all desktop parts, and the power usage is dwarfed by any “modern” (within the last five years) GPU.
There are many people, myself included who opt to use security features like this. All this does is reduce security for folks without any legitimate reason. “Power consumption” is absolutely not a valid excuse to completely disable it.
I’ve been a fan of AMD for a while now but they’re really jumping the shark these days. It’s a real shit situation we’re all in because of the lack of competition in consumer CPUs. I can only hope things like RISCV take off sooner than later.
Whilst I hate companies paying engineers to make things worse just to segment their market; I am not really seeing this as an important feature outside the data-center? If an evil-maid has hardware access they hack the USB and/or PCI not the RAM surely?
Probably not from a legal perspective, but morally yes. Apple cause batterygate with good intentions but sneakily. Not being transparent is what shot them in the foot. AMD didn't learn anything or think this is small-time so no blowback (sadly they might be right).
And there's been talk that now the so-called "AI companies" will start using more CPUs as well, due to "personal agentic agents", so I hope that people won't be priced out of CPUs too...
But yeah 95% of the consumer market don't care about this and it's only adding unnecessary costs
A feature that was possibly accidentally enabled on consumer chips is now being disabled. I would guess that the number of owners of consumer chips who also relied on them for encryption is exceedingly small.
The primary concern persists. The manufacturer has an exceptional amount of control of the state of your CPU most of which you cannot change and an unknown chunk of which you cannot even see. We are sort of playing in a fools paradise.
They either have that control or they don't.
So it's quite possible they were doing the same with TSME, and either made a rude marketing decision that the people using it on consumer chips would probably pay for PRO chips if they were prevented from doing so, or kept getting people attempting to RMA the chips for a feature they never said worked on them not working, or there's some systemic flaw in the consumer chip's implementation that they didn't feel like trying to qualify fixing versus just killing the not-guaranteed support.
Hard to guess without more data than just them going silent about it.
You have to store the encryption key in CPU registers and ensure it's not saved to RAM during task switching or power suspend operations. Tresor used x86-specific debug registers for it, but you could potentially use unused SIMD registers if you masked-off the CPUID bits for them and disabled them for access by user-space.
But securing against attacks from a hostile hypervisor or a server provider needs more than just memory encryption, because they can intercept any part of the boot process and control the hardware/firmware that can lie to your kernel.
To counter that you'd need something like AMD SEV(ES/SNP) with measured boot and remote attestation to switch the only thing you trust to the CPU manufacturer (best you can do IMO).
For most consumer users, RAM encryption primarily adds power consumption and heat generation while providing little practical benefit. They simply don't face many of the threat vectors and attack scenarios that certain industries and enterprise environments must contend with.
I also believe that a strong reason that Optane pdimm's failed, was that it was only available on enterprise servers so hackers didn't get a chance to play with it and build software that took advantage of this special hardware.
Just look at how specialized Infiniband is, even though its awesome and has some great use cases. If it was a commodity tech, there would be 100x times more applications/software that took advantage of it.
this is approximately the same discussion as with ECC RAM: the benefits vastly outweigh the slight performance loss and die area increases.
Memory encryption, on the other hand, provides absolutely no benefit to 99.999% of users. If you consider yourself to be such a high value target that you suspect someone might gain physical access to your hardware without your knowledge and carry out extremely sophisticated hardware attacks to extract your data, you are a tiny minority and it makes sense that such niche protections would require buying specialized hardware. Even then, the odds of such an attack being chosen instead of a far less sophisticated software-based approach are also tiny.
Of course, if the hardware itself supports the feature and AMD simply decided to disable it, that's still a shitty thing to do, but let's not pretend that it is in any way comparable to ECC.
There are many people, myself included who opt to use security features like this. All this does is reduce security for folks without any legitimate reason. “Power consumption” is absolutely not a valid excuse to completely disable it.
I’ve been a fan of AMD for a while now but they’re really jumping the shark these days. It’s a real shit situation we’re all in because of the lack of competition in consumer CPUs. I can only hope things like RISCV take off sooner than later.