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AMD Chipset Driver Vulnerability Can Allow Hackers to Obtain Sensitive Data

Chipmaker AMD has patched a driver vulnerability that could allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information from the targeted system.

Chipmaker AMD has patched a driver vulnerability that could allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information from the targeted system.

The flaw, tracked as ​​CVE-2021-26333 and classified by AMD as medium severity, affects the company’s Platform Security Processor (PSP) chipset driver, which is used by several graphics cards and processors.

According to AMD, which described it as an information disclosure issue, an attacker who has low privileges on the targeted system can “send requests to the driver resulting in a potential data leak from uninitialized physical pages.”

AMD has advised users to update the PSP driver to version 5.17.0.0 through Windows Update or update the Chipset Driver to version 3.08.17.735.

Kyriakos Economou, co-founder of cybersecurity research and development company ZeroPeril, has been credited for discovering the vulnerability. In a technical advisory detailing the findings, the researcher noted that attacks are possible due to information disclosure and memory leakage bugs.

He claims that an attacker could leverage the vulnerability to obtain registry key mappings containing NTLM hashes of authentication credentials, or to obtain data that could be useful for bypassing exploit mitigations such as Kernel Address Space Randomization (KASLR).

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“For example, [the NTLM hashes] can be used to steal credentials of a user with administrative privilege and/or be used in pass-the-hash style attacks to gain further access inside a network” the advisory reads.

Economou also noted that AMD’s list of impacted products may be incomplete. The vulnerability has been confirmed to impact Ryzen 2000 and 3000 series CPUs, which are currently not mentioned in AMD’s advisory.

Related: Voltage Glitching Attack on AMD Chips Poses Risk to Cloud Environments

Related: AMD Unveils New Security Features With Launch of EPYC 7003 Series Processors

Related: AMD Confirms Hacker Stole Information on Graphics Products

Related: Multiple Vulnerabilities Found in AMD ATI Radeon Graphics Cards

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is senior managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher before starting a career in journalism in 2011. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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