In a recent security advisory, chipmaker AMD has confirmed the discovery of four new vulnerabilities in its processors. These issues are related to a type of side-channel attack, similar in nature to the well-known Spectre and Meltdown bugs that were revealed back in 2018.
This time, however, the flaws appear to affect only AMD chips. The company’s research team identified the vulnerabilities during an internal investigation triggered by a Microsoft report. The findings point to specific weaknesses in how AMD processors handle certain instructions at the hardware level, under rare and complex conditions.
The newly disclosed flaws are being tracked under four identifiers: CVE-2024-36350, CVE-2024-36357, CVE-2024-36348, and CVE-2024-36349. According to AMD, the first two are considered medium-risk, while the others are low-risk. The company is calling this group of flaws “Transient Scheduler Attacks” (TSA).
These vulnerabilities involve exploiting the timing of certain CPU operations to potentially access protected data. However, AMD says the practical risk is limited because the attacks require direct access to the affected computer. In other words, someone would need to physically run malicious software on the system in order to take advantage of these issues. They cannot be triggered through a web browser or remotely over the internet.
The impact of a successful attack could, in theory, allow an attacker to view parts of the system memory that should remain privat
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