Back To The Future With Platform Security
summary
Finds and demonstrates concrete AMD platform failures: unlocked SMRAM on an Acer Swift 3 and other models, SPI flash misconfigurations that allow host reads/writes, exploitable SMM handlers that provide arbitrary read/write primitives, and a persistence path that reaches ring -2 (SMM) by corrupting PSP/PSB structures. Authors reverse engineer missing AMD docs, report 20+ CVEs across OEM firmware, and release a verification tool (FlatBox / platforms) that reproduces the issues and checks systems for these misconfigurations.
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chapters (38)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:36Outline
- 1:58Lack of Documentation
- 3:21SMM in a Nutshell
- 4:48SMRAM Protection
- 6:07Unlocked TSEG on Acer Swift 3
- 6:41SMM Unlock Key?
- 7:16SMM Key Backdoor
- 7:44SMM Callout Protections
- 9:06SPI Flash Basics
- 9:25ROM Protected Range
- 10:57SPI Restricted Commands
- 11:44SPI Controller Programming
- 12:35SPI Read Demo
- 14:11The Case of Asus Strix G513QR.330
- 15:46The Story of a Dangerous SMI Handler
- 16:57The Interesting Code
- 17:55The Disabled SMI Interface
- 19:07Exploiting the Bug
- 20:57SMRAM Analysis
- 22:37ROM Armor in a Nutshell
- 23:11The Whitelisted SPI Regions
- 24:13AmdPspRomArmor3Smm Flow
- 25:25Host PSP Communication
- 27:35Late Deregistration
- 31:08Finding the PSB Configuration
- 32:28PSB Fuse Register
- 33:11Example of a good configuration
- 36:47What is an SMM Supervisor?
- 38:36SmmSupervisorBinRelease
- 41:40Example of a Demoted SMI Handler
- 42:14Legacy Supervisor Syscalls
- 43:15Protection via Paging
- 43:38Attack Surface
- 44:03SmmSupvBin Format
- 45:07Project Mu is a fork()
- 45:59SMM Supervisor Policy Analysis
- 49:10Conclusions (2/3)
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